[KDE 3.5.x - Darnya & Elyssa] - Migrating /home

[rec9140]

In an effort to make upgrades easier I am trying out setting up a separate partition for /home

I have a:
/swap
/
/home

What I am looking for is some input, I've seen too many examples of do this, do that, do this etc....

So I have a blank system, essentially, the only thing I've done to this test setup is all the updates. Its now sitting fully updated to Elyssa (I am not Felicia compatible).

As an example:

I use KMail and I want to migrate the existing setup (mail, filters, accounts, etc.) to the new box.

So should I install all the apps I installed first?

Then move the /home stuff?

Whats the best way to do this?

tar?
rsync?
keep?
I want to preserve permissions and UID's so tar or rsync seem to be the candidates for this step.

In the past this has not been an issue as the Linux boxes were never the primary, and didn't have all this data on it, but now they are the only machines. New Linux stuff came out I just blasted the old stuff away. Now Linux is the only game in town.

I'd like to do this in a way that should I be able to move past Elyssa I can do so by doing an install and pointing it to my /swap / /home partitions via the Install script.

Another item.... I set / to be 10GB and then the remainder (minus swap) of the drive is setup as the /home partition... is 10GB enough or should this be larger? Once again I've seen everyones comments on the "black art" of Linux partitioning..... / 10GB- Too small?

Comments, pointers.....

Thanks in advance.

[dafi]

Hm in a few weeks i will be at the same point Hopefully my new PC will arrive here, if i manage to buy one - of course
First:
My root-Partition (/) is only 10GB but i am using only 4.5GB and according to filelight the biggest folder is /usr/share/games with 450MB and /usr/lib/openoffice with 330MB.

At the moment i have a "data" Partition and a home Partition, migrating from windows, the data partition was at first a ntfs one but now its also an ext3. Perhaps my next PC has only one /home partition (and no data or something like that) - i dont really know at the moment because that would mean this partition is nearly 450GB big.

Migrating existing settings should be as easy as copying the whole /home to an ext3-formated external HDD and than copy it to your new PC

[rec9140]

Migrating existing settings should be as easy as copying the whole /home to an ext3-formated external HDD and than copy it to your new PC

Thats why I am looking to use tar or keep, as my external NAS and USB are not Linux disks, they are either NTFS or FAT because they are stock WD MyBook's that I have to share amongst lusers still using winviros etc..

So to preserve this tar or keep or something needs to come into play so it preserves these in the tar.gz and it won't matter where I store the tar.gz

[dafi]

Ah ok.
Hm i tested it... Compressed a file to tar.gz, copied it to a fat device and copied it back the owner and groups are still the same and preserved inside the tar.gz-file