I have Fedora 16 – based server (file, MySQL, Web, SVN) that I am going to replace with a bigger machine. I plan to reinstall Fedora from scratch (with the help of rpm -qa). I am concerned that I am going to leave something important. Obviously, I am going to copy /home and /etc directories. But, for example, SVN database is in /var/svn, while MySQL is in /var/lib/mysql. I am concerned that I am going to miss some important runtime files. Can anybody point to some migration checklist for common packages?
Over time I also put additional help to usr/share/docs but I don't know how whether it's easier to backup and restore, or simply install from scratch.
I read this post and several others, but it deals mainly with how to move linux without reinstalling. I'd rather reinstall (and I plan to make a few changes anyway), but I won't have both machines for more than a few hours – so backing up everything important is my main question.
Best Answer
I'm not sure of what your main question is, however you have several options.
Use dd to backup your current file system off to an external drive or an iso image (which you could mount later like a cd and pull the stuff of you need)
Or use rsync to copy the directories you mentioned
The other value is to just get your data from the main apps you need. For example, mysql - use mysqldump to extract all your database to files. Then you can just install mysql clean and brand new on the target device and import the mysqldump files.
For svn, find out where your repositories actually live and save the repositories. I haven't used svn for years, but I think you can do something like "svnadmin dump repositorypath | gzip > repo.zip"
If you know which data you need, then option 3 may be the easiest, quickest and least storage space. make sure you capture the /etc file. Review the conf files (i.e., /etc/my.conf) and follow other dependent config files and back those up too just in case.