Migrating/reinstalling your system: What to transfer over?

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1

This is not really an acute request for support, but rather a discussion/general advice thread. In the near future I’m planning to reinstall Fedora Workstation. What files should I transfer to my new system for a smooth transition?

Obviously the home directory is going with. But what are less-obvious files and directories (like /etc/fstab or the network configurations) that should also be transfered over?

As for packages, I found this solution: yum - How to replicate installed package selection from one Fedora instance to another? - Unix & Linux Stack Exchange

I am looking forward to hearing your experiences and advice with reinstalling or migrating your Fedora system.

Kind regards
snoekbaars

2

Depending on how much customisation you have done as the administrator you may need to save settings from /etc and possible from /var.

/etc/fstab is usually setup as your install the system, copying from another system will not work.
Only network mount points would need to added back in.

You can save the set of installed rpm packages with rpm -qa | sort >old-package-list.
Then on the new system create the same list and compare them.

rpm -qa | sort >new-package-list
diff -u old-package-list new-package-list

Start adding in the apps that you want to have back.

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