[ Thanks to Joe
Barr for this link. ]
“I received a review copy of Mandrake Linux PowerPack 9.1 last
week. I was happy to see it, but as I noted in the story about my
frugal Red Hat 9 upgrade a couple of weeks ago, I’m a little
hardware-challenged at the moment. Did I let that stop me? Of
course not! When the going gets tough, I did what I usually do, I
begged my long-suffering girlfriend, Susan, for help. Sure enough,
she allowed me to use the well-traveled Sony laptop in her
possession to replace the Red Hat 8 installation with Mandrake 9.1.
Her only requirement was that I not lose any of her data. She
wanted her e-mail, browser settings, and pictures intact. With
warning bells ringing in my head, I assured her that her files were
absolutely safe with me, and no possible harm could come to
them.“Despite this outrageous fib, I avoided a Divine lightning
strike and set to work. Last time I tried a distro transplant I
used cp to back up my personal data files on another machine.
However, that method created problems with file permissions and
ownership. A clever reader advised I try rsync instead. First, I
checked to see if I created a separate partition for /home in the
current installation. Alas, I had not. A separate partition makes
using rsync for back up and restoration easier…”