Re: [PLUG] Merging home directories

[Gordon Dexter <gordon@texasdex.com>]

It has it's pros and cons.  The big pro is that old stuff sort of fades away without you having to do any real cleanup, and the important stuff stays because you copy it from the old directory if you need it.  The minus is that you eventually end up with a path like
/home/gdexter/old_buffy/disk-1/gdexter/liz/gdexter/old_gdexter (not making that up, that's four generations of home directories more or less nested in one another ['buffy' and 'liz' are host names], the oldest with timestamps around 2004) and god help you if you have to find anything older than a year or so.

The other drawback is that you end up with completely different folder structures each time you move, unless you carefully recreate a folder tree in the newly empty directory each time you do it.  I have failed to do so, meaning that most of the otherwise useful merge methods that have been suggested would result in, say, four different places where I keep downloaded files (~/Desktop, ~/downloads, ~/Downloads, ~/Desktop/downloads, etc) making things even more of a mess than they were.

In the end I might just go through at least some of this manually.  Taking a look at some of the really old stuff from when I first switched to Linux full-time already makes me feel a little nostalgic.

--Gordon

On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 2:04 PM, Julien Mills <julienfmills@yahoo.com> wrote:

You know, this is a good bad-habit that I may adopt next time I upgrade to a new computer. 

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.

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