Migrate whole VPS to another server using rsync

Say you're about to cancel a VPS, but first you need to copy its contents (source) over to another server (destination).

We will be using rsync. Note: rsync will keep the original timestamps for both files and folders, so that's good.

General idea:

rsync --params source destination

Because we will copy the whole source VPS, we will have to do it using the root account to avoid permission errors. Since most likely you won't be able to SSH into your source with root from any other server, instead you will have to su to root on the source, and then SSH into the destination. Could be any account on the destination, but lets say it's admin.

Updated general idea:

rsync --params / admin@example.com:/folder

Start by configuring SSH access from the source server to the destination server.

1. Elevate to root on the source server: su - or sudo su -
2. Display and copy the public key of the root account: cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
3. Go to the destination server. Log in to the admin account. Open it's ~/.ssh/authorized_keys for editing and put the copied key in there.
4. Test the connection on the source server: ssh admin@example.com -p 2222

Copying from this server to another

rsync -aAXvh --exclude={"/dev/*","/proc/*","/sys/*","/tmp/*","/run/*","/mnt/*","/media/*","/lost+found","/usr/*","/lib/*","/opt/*","/var/cache/*","/var/lib/*"} -e 'ssh -p 2222' / admin@example.com:~/backup-folder

Notes:

• 'ssh -p 2222': use this specific port for SSH connection
• ~/backup-folder: the copy will go to the backup-folder directory inside user's home directory (~)