/root as bind mount?

Question

I am migrating my system from Debian 32 bit to Debian 64 bit. It is installed on /dev/sda2, so I created /dev/sda3, installed the new system there, synched installed packages and configuration files from /etc and used bind mounts to mount /data and /home from the old system into the new system. So far so good.

Now before I do the final switch, I want to use the system for some weeks. The only thing that is missing is /root, which I rsynched into the new partition. I'd rather have it a bind mount too, but I'm hesitant with this one. So the question:

1. Can /root be a bind mount, or are there going to be problems?
2. What happens between system start and the mount operation, could there be problems?

Answer 1

/root is just the home directory of user root.

Usually /root is a rather "uninteresting" directory only used when you login interactively as root. If you don't remember that you have manually edited or created interesting files there then I would not sync it at all.

On the other hand bind mounting /root should not cause any trouble. Maybe there are some (auto-generated) config files which are nice to sync, like .ssh/known_hosts or .ssh/authorized_keys.

In doubt see

diff -rq /path/to/old/root /root

if you see something you like to keep from the old installation.