I'm documenting the procedure for a full redeploy on my development server. Small staff, using Basic authentication (over SSL, of course) with an htpasswd file backend.
Is it safe to transfer the .htpasswd file as-is?
The Operating Systems will potentially differ, but the software on top (ie. Apache) will be the same.
It's safe to transfer the htpasswd file no matter what architectures you are on. It is a text file. The only case in which you might need to do some conversions is to deal with line endings if you were moving between Unix and Windows, but between Linux/Unix boxes, no problems.