[ILUG] Backing up user accounts

[Trevor Johnston]

On Tue, 12 Sep 2000, Tim Kiely wrote:
> I'll be changing distributions on a box that I have from redhat 6.2 to
> suse 7.0 and I was wondering exactly what files I need to make copies
> of to be able to backup user accounts passwords, groups etc? and what
> I need to do to get them recognized on the new distribution? Is it
> simply a case of copying the files onto the correct locations or are
> there more sinister forces at work that need to be sorted out.
I've done this a number of times - what worked for me was to make some
archives of the /home partition and a number of files in /etc. Not very
professional, perhaps, but I'd no problems.

"cd" to /home. If your user name is "trevor", do a "tar -czvf
trevor.tar.gz trevor". This will create an archive of trevor's home
directory, which can be restored after you reinstall, complete with time
stamps and "hidden" files.

For your passwords, I think the only files most people need to copy would
be "passwd", "group" and "shadow". I can only presume that if you moved to
an OS that had a different password verification scheme that this would
not preserve your passwords. I imagine SuSE 7 uses whatever Redhat 6.2
does for passwords.

Trevor Johnston

PS
I'm no expert at this!