Posted: 12/14/2009 7:52:10 PM EDT
| I want to reformat my HD and reinstall Ubuntu from a clean slate. Before I do that though, I'm obviously going to backup my data (and only data, I don't want any unnecessary system files). All I have in mind are the folders in my home (i.e. Music, Documents, etc.) and firefox bookmarks and settings. Is there anything I may be overlooking or forgetting about? Thanks. |
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Open a terminal and do this: cd /home sudo tar -cvf MyShit.tar yourname This will back up everything in your $HOME folder to a file called MyShit.tar. Copy this file off to some sort of removable media and reinstall. My suggestion would be when you reinstall, do a manual partition and create a partition just for /home, make it a pretty big partition. This way if you switch between distros or reinstall, you can have all over your data/configurations basically the same way as before. Sure some off apps may need a little tweak of a config file, but the majority of the applications use the same configurations and locations between different distros of Linux. When you reinstall, and get to the point where you define your partitions, you create a /home partition of about say 40 gig, and the rest of the disk allocated to / . Depending on the size of your disk, you can make /home bigger or smaller. If you are doing a server setup, then I would suggest a separate /, /home, and /var, but for a desktop system, /home and / are good enough. /home is where all of your user files/data/application configs are normally saved. |
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Oh, and I don't know how versed you are on Linux, but most applications use a hidden folder to store user configs/data. Example of hidden folders (the . will hide files/folders from a normal ls command): /home/hanzerik/.firefox /home/hanzerik/.thunderbird /home/hanzerik/.mozilla open a term and do: cd ~ ls -al will list every file/folder in your $HOME dir I don't use Linux as much as I used too, but still play with it now and then. Started with Red Hat way back in 98, and have tried pretty much all of the different flavors since. Personal favorites are Debian, Slackware, then Ubuntu. Even though Ubuntu is Debian based, it does some things differently. |
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Thanks for the suggestions guys. I only use web-based email with this computer so I won't need to worry about Thunderbird.
As for making ./home a separate partition, I actually read one guide that suggested giving /home, /, /etc and a few other directories their own partition. I'm not sure if that's really necessary though. |