Mass backup
 

HEllo , I am going to format my harddrive completely and re-partition it , i was wondering if there is some way i can save alllllllllll my settings that i have on my current linux distrubutioins ,,, u might say they are petty things but it would be nice if i can BACKUP them , the things are like the history of commands that i ran in kde using RUN COMMAND (alt+f2) my settings of splash screen , amarok settings , my wall paper , taskbar etc etc, i kinda use my root account as i am a single user (i know its a bad habint and i would work on NOT using root account more often ) but for the time being can i save these settings (one wild idea that i have is that i may copy the root folder now and save it on other hd and when i reinstall my linux i paste that root folder there?)

-- also i wanna know if i can create another user account who has the same powers and rights that the root has? how can i do that?

Most of your settings are kept in your home folder. For root this is normally /root

if you perform a ls -a /root you will see a load of files and directories beginning with a . (which is why you need the -a, as files beginning with a . are hidden).

I'm not sure whether this will get absolutely everything, as some programs may put user configuration elsewhere. It should get most things.

If you intend to copy these into place then you should have the same version of all the software. Results can be a bit unpredictable if not, although they are usually forward compatible this is not guarenteed.

If you want to keep system settings as well as user settings, then these are in the /etc directory, but there are a lot of them.

You can have multiple users as root, but this is a bad idea. If logging in with root permissions then they have no limits and there is no user seperation so why would you want to have a seperate username?
To give another user the same permissions as root then you can set its uid to 0. Effectively it will then be root.

A much better way is to use sudo. Login as a normal user and then using sudo multiple users can have the abilty to run commands as root under sudo using only their own password.

If you have more than one distro installed, and you want to save the users and root home directories with history/preferences and so on, look at Dar (and the GUI frontend Kdar).

Basically, boot into your primary distro. Mount the partitions which contain user and root directories to save. Configure Dar to backup only those directories/files you want saved. I'd recommend making a seperate backup for each distro. Restoring them will be somewhat easier that way.

Re-install your distros. Then restore the files to their respective distro.

well in pclinuxos i just found a better way that is REMASTER ... it creates an image (.iso) which one can burn or keep it somewhere and when you install it (by poorman's install) you get all the things the way they were at the time you remastered it :-D
just google for remaster and poorman's install and wooooooohoooooooo