Licking my wounds here :)
 

hey there Gang!

Okay, this weekend has not been fun, I had a sys-wide crash updating my system. Now, I'm on the fork in the road. What distro to choose?
Anyway...that's one for my blog...
I still need to rescue my bookmarks from firefox and my mails from evolution. Neither can be started up. Or...the OS (Arch in my case) cannot be started up anymore.
Simple questions:
- where does firefox keep its bookmarks?
- where does evolution keep its mails?

Thanks!

Thor

Try here -->


Not sure on this one but I would look to see if there is a hidden directory in your home directory. Alot of configs are placed there.




:twocents:

As a thought if you like Arch but don't want to or have the time for a fresh build I would take a look at Manjaro linux. It is basically Arch preconfigured + scripts and tools to manage many of the aspects. I have this on my media server and my netbook and it works great. :)

Thanks! It was a sob-n-sniff moment for me to HAVE (for now) use something else (that by the way works like a charm, but I am a control freak...) but I'll check out the site today, download a set and try it out...
Thanks man, I'll look at the bookmarks next...eh, if I lost some mails, so what. It's personals tuff that needed cleanup anyway...

Sunday!!!

Thor

I backup my data every time I upgrade. An upgrade means re-install everything after backing everything up.

Thanks H_TeXMeX_H, lesson I learned now as well. Now it's just re-gaining trust in the thing...
I noticed you use Slack...I think you can relate to my upgrade-phobia... :D but, you back up, I didn't... silly me...

Thor

Yeah, I do it this way because I'm naturally lazy and it forces me to backup :)

As the ancient Greeks stated : Gnothi seauton, know thyself...you're one step ahead :D

Okay, in answer of this question, and with the help of jv2112's post, I'd like to give a full(er) how to:
I just restored my most recent bookmarks, here's what I did (hoping someone gets some help out of this)

- hook up the "damaged" drive in a PC (my OS was completely dead...)
- put a live CD in the drive, I used Knoppix, but of course, whatever YOU're comfy with goes ;)
- power (or repower) the box until you've got a usable OS
- plug in the USB stick
- possibly (depends on the OS in question) you'll have to go into Root-mode, Knoppix requires this, I believe TTY linux does'nt...if I recall...
- issue fdisk - l to see the drives
- make a folder in /media for each device
- mount each device, some knowledge of the system is in order here. for example, Arch uses /dev/sda4 as home partition, the idea is to mount the home partition in /media
- if available, issue MC (Midnight Commander, the best since sliced bread for this type of operations)
- point each window to its folder (NOT the device, the FOLDER) in /media
- *tip* make a destination folder on the stick, just in case
- navigate to the ./mozilla/firefox folder
- now it get tricky, you should have a folder with some weird name, this is mine:
/home/thor/.mozilla/firefox/guul8brw.default/
- navigate in there and find the bokmarkbackups (or something to the liking, the name is obvious)
- copy the whole folder (while you're here anyway) to the stick
- either unmount the stick or power off the system (as far as the boormarks go, that's all you can do here) if you want to "freeze" the condition of the contents...
- insert the sticj into the destination PC, mount it (if it does'nt do so on it's own)
- navigate into the backup folder, you'll find files that end with json, locate the freshest one (smell does'nt help, look at the date :) )
- copy that one to your home folder
- open Firefox (what? not open yet? Hey, lif is on the Internet, join us!! :D )
- hit "history" and then "show all history"
- select import and backup" then "restore" (duhhh...)
- your file will NOT be in there, what you see are the local backups, all the way down, choose "select file" (more duhh)
- find the file you just copied from the stick and restore from that file

*tip* - if you've bookmarked something until then (chances are you did) open all these pages and THEN restore the file. The restore will overwrite the newer bookmarks of course, then, after the restore, bookmark the pages you just opened into the restored set...

There, I hope some poor soul can be helped here!

Lovin' Linux

Thor

What distro did you end up deciding on and why?
What about Debian unstable or Gentoo? Debian unstable is a partly rolling distro, Gentoo is supposed to be a fully rolling distro... potentially less update hell...

Also,... Might I recommend using a separate /home partition, or even separate /home drive, that and maybe rsync your user partition and most important config files...

Hey there JaseP!
my DEMAND on the installer, just to be on the safe side, so, yes, it's a different partition allright. I'm about to set up an RSYNC server internally here, should have free BSD on it and about 660Gb of disk. It's a Dell server...should be able to run the web projects I develop, a media server (ICEcast) and RSYNC for the whole house...

By the way, I ended up with Xubuntu, partly because it...just works (Debian based, of course) and - at the time - I didn't get heads or tails from the "new" install procedure Arch comes with now. In hindsight it's more flexible now, but Arch does require a lot of manual intervention, something I find myself not doing any more due to lack of time and "stretch" :D , too bad really, Arch was (and IS) great to have around.

Of course, Xubuntu (Debian) has the advantage to have wide install options. One example, I video chat on a regular base with someone over msn (no video support as far as I know) and we use the Google talk plugin in parallel to see each other...Arch has the same, but ported, and the one time I installed it...it killed my firefox... :(

Eh, this works...for now, I'll have to take it somewhat easier, biting my nails during every update takes the fun out of it...pooh

Thor
(By the way - NO OFFENCE to the Arch users out there...)