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I have three systems on my computer, 16.04, broken 17.10, new gnome 17.10. I want to move all my files to one system namely the gnome 17.10 then get rid of the other two systems.

Johan de Jager
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1 Answers1

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Boot the system you plan to keep.

For each of your partitions (16.04 & other-17.10) do the following

  • Mount your partition to a directory. A common mount point in /mnt but you can mount to any directory you want, but check you have nothing already mounted to /mnt, or subdirectories inside there. If you need help here look at Detect and mount devices
  • Copy the files to wherever you want them (I'd suggest cp -p or -p to preserve file attributes, but it's up to you). You could also just use mv to move which means the subsequent [diff] step needs to be skipped eg. cp -prnv /mnt/username/* /home/username/ which will copy everything from your old username-dir to your new username-dir preserving file info, recursively doing subdirectories but only copying 'new' files only (I included this to avoid clobbering any config files in your 'new' directory; but its up to you!). if you don't want all your old-home directory; adjust as appropriate.
  • Diff the original with your new home-directory. this is optional, and if you did the whole /home/username directory new 'config' files will of course show as errors. this step is easiest if you do subdirectories within /home/username, and not the whole user directory
  • unmount when you're happy, sudo umount /mnt (adjusting /mnt to whatever directory you used)

you can of course use your GUI if you prefer. mounting can be done with disks or other tools, and copying with a file manager (files etc).

guiverc
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