[Swlug] Time to switch laptops

[Jonathan Marsden]

Rhys,

Using a suitably large USB stick is simple, usually convenient, and if you are already familiar with doing it that way, great, do it.  One nice side-effect is that you will also have a backup on the USB stick if anything unexpected happens :)

If you are already familiar with rsync or rclone you could use one of them.  However, I suggest you don't use them for this purpose for the first time... mistakes can happen.

If you want to use SSH, then one command to use would be sftp.  So if both machines are on the same local LAN subnet and the new Debian one is at 192.168.1.101 (that is just an example IP address), and running sshd, you could log in to the old machine as orenoco and then do:

  sftp tobermory at 192.168.1.101

and provide the tobermory password when prompted.  When you get to an sftp prompt, the command

    put -Rp .

should recursively copy everything from the home directory of orenoco to the home directory of tobermory, retaining the same permissions and modification times.

Note that this will copy all the hidden "dotfiles" across, which may or may not be what you want to do.  If you only want to copy over "normal" directories/files that do not start with a dot, then doing

    put -Rp *

will ignore all the files and directories that start with a dot.

When you are finished with sftp, the command

    exit

will exit it and return you to the command shell on orenoco.

Final thought: you could consider deleting (or backing up and then deleting!) all the files and directories under tobermory's home directory *before* doing the transfer, so that when completed, you are certain that everything there came across from orenoco and was not left over from the initial Debian tobermory user.

Jonathan
-- 
  Jonathan Marsden
  Pastor, Deer Park Baptist Church, Tenby
  jmarsden at fastmail.fm

On Sat, 31 May 2025, at 00:42, Rhys Sage via Swlug wrote:

> This laptop runs Mint 20.3. I have another laptop running Debian that's 
> pretty well brand new. How do I transfer the documents and settings 
> easily between the two. I can always do it with memory sticks but is 
> there an easier way. The big question - can I do it betweemn different 
> accounts. For example if my account on Mint  was Orenoco and my account 
> on Debian was Tobermory, how would I achieve this? I think it should be 
> possible via SSH.