I copied my /home directory to Windows for safe keeping.
To restore it, I exited GUI (Do you have to exit?) and used the copy command to send the /home dir back to where it should be (as root). Now when I browse my /home/user/mozilla directory, I see that my emails ARE back in the /mozilla directory (This is the only verification I have checked so far). However, non of my inbox folders from before have been restored, my emails have not been restored to the folders and the address book has not been restored.

Is my problem that I did not used a proper backup/restore program or is there something else I need to know? I know the /home dir is saved properly in my Windows files. How do I get it back?

Did you check the permissions & ownerships?

A half-way decent way of saving your home
directory would have been to tar.gz it and copy
that file to windows ... the problem is that the
windows file-system doesn't know about Linux'
ownerships and permissions.


Cheers,
Tink

sofasurfer; Just a suggestion, but you might have to import them back into your mail client.

I am able to view the files that were save in Winows. Would you STILL say that the permissions could be preventing me from copying them back to Linux? If so, am I screwed because I saved them to Windows BEFORE changing the permissions, or can I still get them back by changing the permissions NOW?

Hi

Ive done this quite a few times ( copy home to windows , then send it back and ive had no real problems so far )

There were a few issues when i tried to do it as a local user though,
but if you log in as root and try there should be no problems
.

cheers

I'm sure that I've done it as root, but its 3:35am, I'll try it again tomorrow.
Thanks for the encouragement : )

> I copied my /home directory to Windows for safe keeping.

What exactly do you mean "to Windows"?!

> To restore it, I exited GUI (Do you have to exit?) and used the copy command to send the /home
> dir back to where it should be (as root).

If you have a mounted vfat file system and you copied files to it you will lose your ownership permissions. If you copy them back as root, they will be owned by root. And no, you do not have to leave the GUI, you can simply open a console (xterm, gterm or whatever) in X11.

tar'ing would be safer as Tinkster pointed out. But you should be safely able to restore the files. I believe Mozilla has an option for importing mail folders. In case you have worked with Mozilla when the files were removed, it will re-index its mail folders and not automatically re-import them. You will have to do that manually. But first "chmod user.user /home/user/ -R" your home directory

Cheers,

Uwe