restore with rsync or fix window manager

[Brian Cluff]

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 at 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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