My original Jaguar -> Panther migration never went well, but I didn’t have time to reinstall until now. With 5 new people joining our small business in a few weeks, now seams like a good time to reinstall the machine.

I am concerned that some of my LDAP settings are screwy from things that I did to support remote SAMBA servers, etc. My thought is that I should back up as little as possible about my users, so that I can reinstall (which should also fix my messed up Kerberos settings), but I want to keep the users, with their passwords if possible, so that I don’t have to reset permissions all over the place.

How would you go about such a backup. I have a Firewire drive that I plan to move the data to, but I am concerned about losing things like email. I’d like to take this opportunity to clean out mailboxes/home directories for former employees.

Does anyone have a White Paper on how to do this? I originally planned to migrate my system to another machine life (as a replica server) and then promote the replica (that is how I did Windows NT 4 migrations), rebuild the server as a replica, and promote it back… but that doesn’t seem to be possible. Are there any suggestions?