Migrating to a new server can be a complex and involved task. Not only do you have to transfer the data itself to a new location, you also have to replicate the service environment and ensure that your components interact as you expect them to.

In this series, we will take you through the steps needed to migrate an existing installation to a new server. Follow along to start developing your migration plan.

There are many different considerations you should make when migrating from one system to another. In this guide, we will discuss how to prepare your source and target systems for a migration. This will include getting your two machines to communicate with SSH keys and a deep investigation as to what components need to be transferred.

In the previous tutorial, we prepped our servers for data migration. At this point, your target and source system should be able to communicate (the target system should have SSH access to the source system), and you should also have a list of software and services that you need to transfer, complete with version numbers of the most important components. In this guide, we’ll continue where we left off and begin the actual migration to our new server.

In the last tutorial of this series, we will finish up our migration by transferring users, groups, mail, crontabs, and other settings over to our new server.