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How would one go about migrating from Centos 7 to Ubuntu without losing data? Or is it even relatively possible?

  • That depends if you have separate partitions, at least for / and /home. – xangua May 27 '15 at 02:17
  • They are in a single partition. Mostly I am concerned with things like network settings, etc. –  May 27 '15 at 02:30
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    Then you'll have to backup and install. – xangua May 27 '15 at 02:30
  • IIRC CentOS's method for upgrading releases is: "Backup and install". I doubt you find any other method for moving to a different distro altogether. – muru May 27 '15 at 04:49

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I recommend the following way:

  1. Make a working backup from which you can easily read if you have enough storage space (e.g. a disk image which you can mount instead of a compressed archive which you have to read completely in order to extract one file)
  2. Figure out where applications on CentOS store data which you can reuse on Ubuntu (if you use the same desktop environment a lot of settings will be preserved in your $HOME folder, but in order to make sure you have to research this information for each application that you want the settings to be preserved). Move data to a shared partition and create links and mount points (some applications might not like links because they fail to resolve the link and complain about permission issues, therefore test whether the applications work on CentOS right after moving the data)
  3. Install Ubuntu and include the data from the shared partition like you did on CentOS. You might figure out that you missed some files, so move them to the data partition from the backup

This setup allows you to share data between multiple OS as long as applications don't get confused with different versions (e.g. using firefox 36.x on CentOS and 38.x on Ubuntu will cause the settings to be updated at every start and might mess up files at some point - this is a per application research task as well). In case of incomptibility of versions you need to figure out a custom synchronization routine which is out of scope of the OS, i.e. Ubuntu.

Remember to use a command which preserves permissions, e.g. cp -a or rsync -a when you move files.

Kalle Richter
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