Raymond, Or you can avoid the mount using netcat. on oldmachine run cpio (or tar or whatever) | nc newhost 9865 on newhost run nc -l -p 9865 | cpio -pVd /home I like star as it seems to be pretty fast and reports very nicely on errors at the end. I like netcat because it's low overhead and works with rescue disks so nicely. Especially important when the machine you're copying from is having troubles and you just want to get the data it. On oldmachine: cd /home star -c . | nc newhost 9865 On newmachine: nc -l -p 9865 | (cd /home; star -xp) YMMV. But I'll be you were looking for a good way to know you got it all, eh? I usually just compare numbers of files and do lots of du's to make sure it's all there. Good luck. -- Gerry Skerbitz gsker at tcfreenet.org On Mon, 25 Nov 2002, Yaron wrote: [SNIP] > and then use cpio to copy the home directories over, as in: > oldmachine:/home# find . print|cpio -pVd /mnt/newmachine/home > [SNIP]