How to keep all my customizations when reinstalling Slackware
 

I tried upgrading once. I must have done a mistake while following the instructions, and I ended with a rather shaky KDE (reinstalling it did not fix it).

I have decided that, until I get the hang of upgrading, I will just reinstall Slackware, which seems to be what many users do anyway.

To keep my custom settings (at least most of them), I was thinking of backing up the following directories:

1. /home/xri/.config
2. /home/xri/.kde/share/config

Questions:

• Any other directory that I should backup and then copy to my new installation?
• Any other procedure to restore my custom settings after reinstall?

Thanks for reading this.

Why not just backup all of your home directory? I am sure there are more programs than just KDE which you would like to preserve your settings for.

For that matter, if this is the way you want to handle upgrades, your best bet is really to put /home on it's own partition, so when you reinstall you don't even touch that partition. You should of course still keep backups, but if you go this route you only need them in the event of data loss, not every time you upgrade.

I also normally backup /etc, since there are numerous custom configs in there....


cheers,

If your home directory is on a partition mounted on /home then you will not need to backup any of your own settings for your desktop as they will not actually be touched by the new install, however modifications in /etc will be overwritten so you will need copies of those files. As you will probably be upgrading from KDE3 to KDE4 you should not actually keep your settings in ~/.kde/* and ~/.kderc as they cause problems with KDE4. On a side issue the version of KDE4 in 13.0 is not as good as the version in current, in my opinion, and you may wish to consider that before deciding how you wish to upgrade.

samac

i also backup my /home directory. and some files from /etc.