[Gloucs] Changing Operating systems.

[Andrew M.A. Cater]

On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 08:41:15PM +0100, Tom Llewelyn wrote:
> Everything that's personal to you will be in your home directory.
> 
> So /home is a must.  I'd be wary of just blindly using a home directory on
> multiple distros though - should be OK but version mismatches can sometimes
> give strange results.
> 
> Any configs you have customised will be in /etc, so worth backing that up so
> you can recover settings + configs if need be.
> 
> Logs and cached data live in /var.  Depends if you care about any of it.
> 
> Some 3rd party software installs in /opt  by default e.g. Oracle products
> 
> /root may have some useful info although unlikely on Ubuntu.
> 
> There may be the odd thing in /usr/local
> 
> Hope that helps
> 
> On 12 August 2011 20:29, GEOFF BAGLEY <geoff.bagley at btinternet.com> wrote:
> 
> >
> > I currently have a Ubuntu system running on my ASUS laptop,  but would like
> > to replace the operating  system with Debian.
> >
> > I have a backing store on a 495GB external drive onto which I can save all
> > my collected information.
> >
> > Which files (e.g. /home/* ) do I need to transfer to the external back-up
> > drive,  so that the new OS can pick up the whole system ?
> >
> > Alternatives might have been  dual-boot,  or a virtual machine
> > implementation,  though I currently have an inclination to dump Ubuntu in
> > favour of Debian.
> >
> > Please does anyone have an opinion on this ?
> >
> > Best regards,
> >
> > Geoff
> >
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> >
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/home /var/spool/mail and anywhere else there's an odd old mailfile. 

Anything like mail configuration/usernames, fetchmail scripts, ISP nameserver addresses / favourite NTP servers from /etc
if they're held there.

Debian and Ubuntu both share common user name - number mappings (start at 1000 for the first non-system user) - if you've 
only got yourself as user, then chances are even the UID/GID will be the same.

Hope this helps,

AndyC