I do this often with text files and audio/video files, and do not encounter many problems since the files are usually owned by my primary non-root user account. Files which are owned by, for instance, my primary Debian account (uid=1000) will get the ownership of my primary FreeBSD account (uid=1001) although I'm not sure exactly how or why this works. I usually use tar -czpf
to create a .tgz file, and extract it on the other system with tar -xzpf
. I don't use this method for files owned by, for example, root or postgres, not only because of non-native system concerns, but also out of concerns that the user and group ownerships probably wouldn't be right, because the uid's and group id's probably wouldn't match, but I would expect any text files' or audio/video files' contents to be correctly transfered. The -p
option is to preserve file permissions, user and group ownerships, and timestamps. If you try to put the tar file on an msdosfs file system it can't be bigger than 4 GB, due, if I'm not mistaken, to the limitations of the msdosfs or FAT32 file system requirements.