Joel Roth via Dng said on Mon, 6 Oct 2025 15:52:27 -1000

>Hi List,
>
>I've made a few changes to the OS configuration of my home
>machine. Rather than try to reproduce those changes
>one-by-one on my laptop, I'm thinking of restoring a backup.
>
>Looking at my (self-written) backup utility, I find this
>comment.
>

>    do not overwrite when porting to another machine

>

>    /etc/fstab
>    /etc/modules/
>    /boot 
>    /etc/lilo.conf

>
>Do you have any comments, suggestions about what all
>to avoid clobbering?

I have suggestions, but they won't be popular...

I love Unix, I love POSIX, but somebody was asleep at the switch 40
years ago when they decided it would be a good thing to commingle user
data, program configuration, executables ($HOME/bin), and for gosh
sakes voluminous recreateable cache files all under $HOME. And to add
insult to injury, the cd command defaults to $HOME instead of something
like $HOME/data.

As a result of this bad decision 40 years ago, if you simply restore
$HOME, a lot of stuff is likely to break or conflict with config
installed by the package manager and not intended to be modified.

I can understand the choice 40 years ago: Unix cost a fortune, PDP-11s
cost a fortune, and the idea of one person using a Unix computer was
laughable. And most users were so unsophisticated that they would never
change config files: Didn't know how. But for a modern single person
using a Linux computer, this interconglominitization of file usages is
guaranteed to cause trouble on backup, restore, or transfer to a new
computer.

Knowing that my computers are single user, I put most of my data under
/d , which I created and chowned slitt:slitt just for this purpose. I
still have some quickie data files in $HOME. When I transfer to a new
computer, I copy the old computer's /home to the new computer's
/oldhome, and let installation have its way with the new /home . Then,
as the months go by and I find files missing or configs that used to be
and need to be specially coded, I copy those files from the /oldhome
tree to the /home tree . This works because 90% of my data is in /d ,
which isn't affected by the package manager.

By doing it the way I do it, I avoid most of the "ghosts from operating
systems past" that show up on traditional "copy /home from the old
computer to the new computer" installs.

HTH,

SteveT

Steve Litt

http://444domains.com