Tim Allen on 21 Apr 2011 06:18:19 -0700


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Re: [PLUG] Merging home directories

You could also start a new git repo, and do an add / commit / push after you rsync each new directory in. Not the prettiest solution, but git could then you'd be assured to have a copy of any "same name, different content" files in the git repo. Then operate as normal, if you you ever have to revert, you have your version control.
.
Regards,

-Tim

On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 1:38 AM, JP Vossen <jp@jpsdomain.org> wrote:
Date: Wed, 20 Apr 2011 20:04:20 -0400
From: Gordon Dexter<gordon@texasdex.com>


I have the unenviable task of merging 5 different home directories from
three different computers, spanning 5 years, and I was wondering if there
was any tool that might simplify things.  My eventual goal is to have one
unified, well organized home directory that is versioned (e.g. via Git) and
synced between multiple computers.  The last few times I've moved or
upgraded I just put the previous home directory as a subfolder of the newer
one, so on one computer I have /home/gdexter/old_gdexter/older_gdexter and I
haven't even gotten around to doing that on my newest computer.  This is
compounded by bad habits such as putting things on the desktop if I don't
know what to do with them.

I'd rather not lose anything, of course, but I'd also rather not go through
each homedir item by item and manually copy or merge things.  Are there
tools that help you with this sort of thing?  Any suggestions to save my
sanity?

Ouch.

First, MAKE A BACKUP!!!

Then, go through and nuke or move anything obvious.

My next thought is to recursively md5sum all the files, then pick out and remove the dups, to trim it down.  (Yeah, I know md5 is old and broken but it's good enough for this and reasonably fast.)  That'll be ugly to impossible without some command line and script knowledge though.

After that, there are some GUI tools.  Meld will help compare dirs. Unison will probably do that too, though it is really intended for merging a local to a remote dir.

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