Hi all

Am about to do a clean install of Mandrake 10.1 (currently running 10). Before doing so I wish to back up my users home directories.

I've tried copying them over to an external hard drive as the user themselves but got errors copying the files. Fine, must be a permission problem - I thought, so went to try it as root and got the same problem.

I'm clearly missing something really obvious here - whats the best way of performing a complete backup of the home dirs (including all the 'hidden' KDEmail folders etc)

TIA

Thin

I can't help you but can give you some sort of guidance for next time. Put your /home on a seperate partition or hard drive that way upgrading your system, will just leave /home intact.

Try this... as root...

cd /

tar -czvf users_home_directories.tar.gz /home/*

Copy the resulting file called users_home_directories.tar.gz to some other media.

Install Mandrake 10.1

Copy the file back to root

Then

tar -xzvf users_home_directories.tar.gz /home/*

If you are going to merely "copy" the directory structure, do it from the command line...

e.g.

mount /mnt/newdisk <--- replace with actual device name...
mkdir /mnt/newdisk/home

cd /

cp -raf /home/* /mnt/newdisk/home

The "a" (archive") flag is what is most important to avoid the errors and wrong permissions, etc.

is it that important if it is a huge hasstle to upgrade? I am not a mandrake user but generally there are no huge changes between such close releases.

Also it would be good if you posted the errors from copying the files.

While small version change upgrades tend to work well, a complete re-install usually fixes scripts, etc. that might be skipped by both the user and installation scripts.

Because of this results are usually better with the backup, re-install scenario.

That said;

Your milage may vary.

Thanks for everyones comments.

reddazz - my home dirs were on a seperate partition, I've had hard disks conk out before during upgrades / reinstalls so I like to take a full backup beforehand if poss. While all the really important stuff (documents etc) was backed up to CD there was a whole ton of crap in there that the family didn't want to lose

Opjose - thanks did the trick wonderfully

Don't forget some key config files in the /etc directory such as /etc/samba/samba.conf.

When you get errors complaining about not being able to change permissions during copying, the problem is on the drive you are copying to. Backing up to a windows fat32 or ntfs drive will do this. The files are there but in the windows case they are all marked as executable. It's not a real problem, you just have to correct the flags after restoring in this case.

When you copy files back to your home directory, do it as your normal user login NOT root or all the files copied will belong to root instead of you.