Moving users from one Ec2 machine to another

Question

I have an Amazon Linux machine, where users log in and connect to other servers (Bastion server), now I have upgraded my Linux machine to.

How do I move all the users present in server1 to Server2

Things I have tried:

1. created snapshots of Server1
2. converted to volumes and attached it to Server2.

Please suggest what else I can do to get all users from Server1

Answer 1

You should not create snapshots of the boot disk, since it contains the Operating System.

Instead, you should:

• Start with the raw Amazon Linux 2 image
• Create the new users in the Operating System. See: Add new user accounts with SSH access to an EC2 Linux instance
• Copy the /usr/USERNAME directories from the old instance to the new instance

This will preserve the users' settings and SSH keys.