Migrate whole system from one host to another

Written by Simone

I recently moved from OVH to Contabo for my VPS: since setting up everything from scratch looked like a hard challenge, I moved everything using rsync.

Firstly, some preparations:

  • installed the same kernel I had on OVH
  • rebooted Contabo
  • installed rsync on Contabo

Then I switched to the OVH shell:

  • created a exclude.txt file with all the directory and file I didn't want to move:
/boot/
/etc/modules
/etc/fstab
/etc/mtab
/etc/netconfig
/etc/networks
/etc/network/
/etc/ssh/
/etc/cloud/
/etc/cloud-release
/etc/grub.d/
/etc/host.conf
/etc/hostname
/etc/hosts
/etc/hosts.allow
/etc/hosts.deny
/etc/init.d/cloud-config
/etc/init.d/cloud-final
/etc/init.d/cloud-init
/etc/init.d/cloud-init-local
/etc/initramfs-tools/
/etc/default/grub
/etc/default/grub.d/
/etc/kernel/
/etc/kernel-img.conf
/lib/modules/
/lost+found/
/sys/
/proc/
/dev/
/tmp/
/var/cache/
/var/log/journal/
/mnt/
/root/.ssh/

  • moved it to /root/exclude.txt

  • stopped all the running services

    systemctl stop <service>

  • now we can begin rsync-ing: you have to have access to the root user on destination VPS

    rsync -avzP --exclude-from=/root/exclude.txt / root@CONTABO_IP:/

  • after that, I edited /etc/fstab to add support for quota, like I had on OVH

  • then I searched and grepped /etc for my OVH IP address, because I knew it was set somewhere on some config file

    grep -r “OVH IP” /etc/*

  • and substituted it with the new Contabo IP, where necessary.

Finally, I could reboot Contabo:

reboot

Once up & running again, I changed all DNS entries from OVH to Contabo IP.. And waited 😀

  • Last but not least, I edited etc/hosts manually to reflect the new Domain Name address and also set up the hostname

    hostnamectl set-hostname <new-hostname>

Done!

EDIT! A detail I missed to mention is that your destination host's root password will be changed, after rsync-ing, to the one of the source host!!

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