really? So are you saying that with ubuntu you do not need to have a home partition?

I did not backup my config files. I only backed-up ~/Documents .

I am considering this as my backup strategy:

rsync -auq --exclude --delete-excluded (on first run) ~/Pictures/* --exclude --delete-excluded (on first run) ~/Documents/* /media/bmike1/<tba>/Settings
rsync -auq --include ~/Pictures /media/bmike1/<tba>/Pictures
rsync -auq --include ~/Documents /media/bmike1/<tba>/Documents

everything except pictures probably will most likely not require much room so likely I will put them together on one drive.

so I did verify that the problem is my user as I created another account and logged in and everything is fine

As for your comment to backup my current data there is no need to because since everything has gone bonkers I haven't created any new files. So after my fresh install I'll restore my files with:

rsync -aWq /media/bmike1/RedSanDisk /home/bmike1/Documents

and everything should be fine.

Here is something weird that happened: I was working on my computer and had a glass of wine. I then went to bed and woke at like 2AM. After waking I went into the computer room and had no internet. I went back to bed at this point to wake at 6 to find I still had no internet. So I called Cox to hear the familiar 'we don't support Linux but everything is fine on our end.' So I restart the computer and internet was back.

On Sat, Jan 9, 2016 at 11:26 PM, Brian Cluff <brian@snaptek.com> wrote:

I hope you haven't overwritten your files yet. If you aren't backing up and restoring any config files then you aren't going be to restoring anything that will fix your machine at all. All you'll be doing is writing older versions of your files possibly loosing data. If you are backing up configuration files, I would restore only those for now.

I would actually recommend that you backup (not restore) all your current data and then reinstall from scratch including starting fresh with new config files. That way any weird situations you have going on with your package dependencies will be eliminated.

Then start your regular dist-upgrades, making sure to look over any files it says it's going to remove for anything that looks necessary to the system.

If it is a user level configuration problem, you can check that by creating a new user account and logging in with it. If everything is fine, then you know you have something to fix with your account. If it still broken, then look at the system itself and your user profile is probably fine.

If your user profile is fine, a little piece of trivia that you might not already know is that when you do a fresh install of an Ubuntu system over an existing install, but you uncheck the format option on the partition that the system is going to be installed to, it will delete everything except for the /home directory leaving your user account(s) intact. It will even try and reinstall as much of the programs that you already had installed so that the system will be back to where you left it, only hopefully working this time. I've only done it a couple of times, but it's worked well for me both times.

Brian Cluff

On 01/09/2016 07:30 PM, Michael Havens wrote:

I was just going to enter the rsync text
('rsync -aWq /media/bmike1/RedSanDisk /home/bmike1/Documents')
into a terminal ((I verified this goof only affects this user) when I
realized I wasn't sure I had all of the nuances and I wanted to make
sure I got it down right before I really screwed tings up. First: Here
is the directory and file of the backup:

bmike1@MikesBeast ~ $ ls /media/bmike1/RedSanDisk
Documents

Second: the rsync manpage talks about the trailing slash changing the
behavior of the way it copies. I don't understand.

'rsync -aWuq --delete-before /home/bmike1/Documents
/media/bmike1/RedSanDisk'

seems to copy it the way I want. Does the slash affect the way it copies
it back. Or else what does it do?

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