Saving profiles

[trickster]

Is there anyway I can redo my machine and save my settings? I have everything on only one partition... Should I keep my settings if I save my home directory?

[pbharris]

yea! i do that everytime i backup my system, which is not too often... anywho what i do is create a tarball of my home directorty, when i untar it everything is back in place.

e.g. for creating it:
tar -cf pbharris.tar /home/pbharris
gzip pbharris

then to get it restored do a mighty
tar -zxvf pbharris.tar.gz while at the root directory level - i.e. /

or just do:
tar cfz pbharris.tar.gz /home/pbharris

or even better:
tar cfj pbharris.tar.bz2 /home/pbharris

bz2 = better compression
that -j flag might also be -y or -i depending on how your distro installed tar.

tar --help should tell ya

[trickster]

Thank you, both
*goes to reinstall*

[Blaqb0x]

What about restoring your profile after you have upgraded to another version of RH? say when RH 7.4 comes around and I want to restore my profile, won't there be changes in .gnome or other things that might not be compatible with the old profile?

thanx,

there can always be changes in the way some program saves it settings

the solution?
rm -rf ~/.directory/where/the/settings/of/that/app/are/saved

[pbharris]

i never worry about it, even between distros, teh settings should work. i have used the same settings between my redhat and debian for about 2 years with only a couple of issues, and they were applciaion specific - xine was one i think...

[pam]

If you can, I would be inclined to keep a copy of /etc too. Not to restore back, but as a reference for some of those hard won configuration settings (you know, the ones that took you hours to figure out)

[trickster]

I just realized the hard way! :'(
But it is ok. I got it almost done.

[pbharris]

wheew, good point pam

[edit]
DOH!!
[/edit]