I stupidly corrupted my HDD and now I need to place backup onto different HDD

Ok, I was playing with a windows 2000 install. I'm guessing it didn't like the taste of my HDD, so it corrupted the HDD. I don't even remember applying any partition changes, but it corrupted the drive.

Anyway, luckily *exhale*, I made a backup of my user and a lot of research I was conducting. Well, it's off by a month, but I didn't do much within the past month.

Mainly, I'm trying to do these main things:

1. Move the backup of /home/myotherusername from a tarred file on a USB drive to the /home folder on a HDD of a different computer

2. Reconfigure evolution to use the screen names, settings, passwords, email addresses, and folders that originally belonged to that user: I can't recall the passwords. I only know one password, and for the others, they are probably hidden in many, many places that I can't recall.

3. Place back Pidgin settings for all of my AIM screen names. I'm more concerned with the evolution, but I would really like the AIM screen names back, since I can only remember about half of the passwords at any given time.

I'd really, really appreciate any help all of you could give. I really need to get these things back into working order.

So, now, I have these things:

/research
/office
/home/myotherusername

I know how to put /research and /office back into their place. That shouldn't be too hard.

But what is getting me is how to put /home/myotherusername onto the different computer.

You see, I want to keep all the setting and features of that user. First and foremost, I can't remember a lot of the passwords to my email addresses. Those passwords were lost with the sands of time, and unless someone knows a way to look at an /.evolution folder's files and crack them for a password, then I'm out of luck.

So, I figure my only option is to take /home/myotherusername and place it onto /home on the new drive on the computer I'm typing on at the moment.

Will this actually work out? Am I going to run into problems?

I mean, I could create a new folder under root like...

/movinghome

and place /home/myotherusername into /movinghome... thus /movinghome/myotherusername and then make the user "myotherusername" and move the /moving../myotherusername to the home folder on this computer.

Will this actually work out, though?

I always find myself running into weird GNU/Linux issues whenever I move around settings and home folders.

Again, I'm trying to do these main things:

1. Move the backup of /home/myotherusername from a tarred file on a USB drive to the /home folder on a HDD of a different computer

2. Reconfigure evolution to use the screen names, settings, passwords, email addresses, and folders that originally belonged to that user: I can't recall the passwords. I only know one password, and for the others, they are probably hidden in many, many places that I can't recall.

3. Place back Pidgin settings for all of my AIM screen names. I'm more concerned with the evolution, but I would really like the AIM screen names back, since I can only remember about half of the passwords at any given time.

I'd really, really appreciate any help all of you could give. I really need to get these things back into working order.

why not use new passwords?
anyway what is evolution?

Might work o.k.
Getting the /home data there should be just as simple as the other stuff. *don't* put it under /root first - that will probably screw up all the permissions.
Create the user, copy the data directly to /home/that_other_user. If it were me I'd create the user with the same uid/gid as it had just to be sure.

It's not working "ok," though.
I was able to get a lot of things restored.
In general, I have yet to get the evolution working.

I was able to put the .evolution folder and the .gconf/apps/evolution back into place. I'm guessing the other option of a .gnome2 doesn't exist, because i used a keyring or something. I'll need to look into that.

Excellent. I figured it out.

I looked around the forum and found this link:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...estore+%2Fhome

topic: How to restore Evolution backup
poster: yaarappa

Basically, what I did was this:

first off, start evolution, then delete the .evolution folder from the /home/someuser/ on the HDD.
Don't delete it off the USB, duh, right?

1. Place /.gconf/apps/evolution on USB into ./.gconf/apps/evolution
2. create folder on desktop: TOBETARRED
3a. extract .evolution folder on USB to ./TOBETARRED
3b. set the permissions

chown -R someuser:someuser $HOME/Desktop/TOBETARRED
chmod -R 775 $HOME/Desktop/TOBETARRED

4. Tarred that folder in ./TOBETARRED to evolution-backup.tar.gz
5. Restarted evolution

Then evolution asks me if I want to restore a "backup"

6. Select the evolution-backup.tar.gz I created.
7. Wait a few moments and let things take place
8. Access the information


What is really, really nice about this is that my email screennames were put back into place. That's because I used a keyring. All of my contacts were put back in place, too.

The thing that makes this event different, which I saw from the beginning, was that I thought evolution would only allow a backup that the program itself made. Well, that's not true. What happened is that evolution accepted the ./.evolution folder I had stored on my USB and allowed me to tar it an insert it into the program as a "supposed" backup.

Things worked out.

Other than that, I didn't lose too many things. I think I will consider backuppc more serious this time and just backup to my server more often.

Cute - thanks for the follow-up.
I've used Evolution backups, but didn't realize it was just a standard tar. That's nice - too many apps want to store "customized" data.

lmfao.
You're name is in that referenced thread, holmes!

P.S.

I also found that if a person looks through seahorse
$ seahorse

a person can actually view the saved passwords if a keyring was originally used.

Extremely useful.