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I am going to upgrade Linux Mint 13 to Linux Mint 17.1 on a home computer. I am going to do a fresh upgrade. There are three partitions for swap, / and /home. I will preserve swap and /home. The partition for / will be formatted and Linux Mint 17.1 will be installed there.

There are four users (including me) on this machine. The files and settings will be safe in /home.

The question is how can I preserve user accounts (login names and login passwords) for other users? I know the login information is stored in /etc/passwd. I can save and restore this file (or information about other three users). So I can link the home folders with correct login names and UIDs.

What about passwords? Is it enough to save and restore /etc/shadow?

It is easy for one user systems. I would just restore my user account during the install by choosing the same login name and login password. And it will correctly link with the correct home folder.

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  • Just be careful not to modify accounts with UIDs less than 1000 (or whatever value your system is set to start numbering user accounts at).
    – Daniel B
    Jan 31, 2015 at 15:34
  • It is easy for one user systems. I would just restore my user account during the install by choosing the same login name and login password. It is not. You will get a new and empty home folder.
    – khajvah
    Jan 31, 2015 at 16:01
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    Check out this link
    – khajvah
    Jan 31, 2015 at 16:04
  • @khajvah That’s not true for separate /home partitions. Of course it won’t delete existing user folders. At the very worst, the UIDs might not match, but fixing that is trivial.
    – Daniel B
    Jan 31, 2015 at 16:25
  • @DanielB I meant, empty folder for the particular user not the entire partition.
    – khajvah
    Jan 31, 2015 at 16:31

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