Re: [PLUG] Merging home directories

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.

Typically when I move between computers I use a similar approach. I've found the size of storage tends to expand so quickly that by the time I upgrade the entire contents of my old drive only uses maybe 10-30% of the new one, so I just copy the whole thing.

I then do an intentional data migration of important stuff like documents/etc. I'd be likely to just copy the whole /home directory. I've never needed to really merge anything, however.

Then the copy of the old drive sits and rusts away, until I notice it a few years later and realize I haven't accessed it in ages and then I usually just delete it. In the meantime if I realize I need something I just dive in and recover it.

Oh, and as far as finding things go - that's what mlocate is for...

Rich

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