[ILUG] Backing up user accounts

[Philip Reynolds]

Trevor Johnston's [tjohnston at oceanfree.net] 33 lines of dribble included:
:>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.

tar cvfz backup-home.tar.gz /home
Might be a better idea, everything in home should generally be backed up.

:>"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.

If you're using Md5 for your passwords on the RedHat box, make sure you're
using it on the SuSE box. If you're recompiled kernel, copy over kernel
config, and do a kernel recompile using "make oldconfig"
Generally /etc/group /etc/passwd /etc/shadow /etc/gshadow ... should be OK.
Anything which relates to users basically...
When copying files over to the new box, make sure backups are kept of data in
/etc in case something goes wrong of course and you have to revert back to a
useable state..
Phil.