burn it all down… or?

Ahh, a tale born from the first time that I dipped my toes into the weird, wide and wonderful world of distro-hopping. Because sometimes, instead of building it all from scratch again (like so many of us are fond of doing), bringing your old config, notes of a previous home, with you is desirable. Because don’t lie - we won’t get those hours spent tweaking shell configs to look just how we like it back.

In any case - the following (somewhat high-level) overview should get you up and running on a new system/distro fairly quickly, in an environment

Basically, most user settings (from my research - some may be hidden in other corners, but this got me back to a similar place) are stored in `/home/[user-name]/.config/.

So, for me, this was at /home/juni/.config/. So, simply copy that folder to an external drive or over the network, and paste it in the corresponding place on your new system.

- Copying over .config

1. cd /home/[user]/

   • navigate to the user’s directory where the .config folder is stored.

2. `sudo tar cvzf configs-backup.tgz .config/

   • creates a compressed archive (configs-backup.tgz) of the .config folder with tar, and passing cvzf as parameters:
     • c - create a new archive
     • v - enable verbose output, to monitor the progress
     • z - compress with the gzip algorithm
     • f - specifies the name of the created archive file (in this case, configs-backup.tgz) Alternatively, you could use a tool like rsync to copy the entire /home/ folder to an external ssd, although this can take a long time depending on its size. I’d recommend rsync over just copying with cp, as rsync copies all files whilst retaining owner/group/other file permissions.

3. If connecting an external SSD to copy to: `sudo fdisk -l

   • lists the connected disk drives and their corresponding filesystem location - like `/dev/sda1)

4. `sudo mkdir -p /mnt/externalssd

   • creates a folder on your computer’s filesystem to act as a mount point: i.e. a place where you can access files stored on a mounted external SSD.

5. `sudo mount -t exfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/externalssd

   • Mounting the SSD (the device we found at /dev/sda1) ‘in’ this new folder created in the previous step, allowing all the files on it to appear in /mnt/externalssd.

6. You should now be able to navigate there with cd /mnt/externalssd and run a ls to show the SSD’s existing contents. Then, copy the compressed .config file with cp /home/[user]/configs-backup.tgz /mnt/externalssd (may require prepending sudo depending on user permissions) - and you’re done!.

If you opted for rsync instead above:

sudo rsync -avh --progress /home/[user]/ /mnt/externalssd/home-backup - a - preserves file attributes & ensures a mirror copy is created, including permissions, symlinks, etc. - v - enable verbose output, to monitor the progress - h - ensures output is human-readable - --progress - displays real-time progress for troubleshooting purposes.

7. Now just unmount the drive with sudo umount /mnt/externalssd (or don’t - live on the edge ;), plug it into new machine/distro, and copy the file you created over into /home/[new-user]/ with cp.

   Make sure to de-compress the file (if you used tar) with tar xvzf configs-backup.tgz, so it can be read by the system!

   Then reboot, and your settings should be re-applied! :3

- BONUS: Grabbing a list of installed packages to re-install

Optionally, if you want to grab a list of all packages/apps installed on your current distro to bring over and auto-install on your new one, run the following:

Debian-based distros (e.g. Ubuntu, Kali, etc.):

1. dpkg --get-selections > installed-packages.txt
   • saves a list of all packages to installed-packages.txt. Save this on an external SSD or transfer to the new machine via the network. On the New Machine/Distro:
2. sudo apt update
3. Navigate to where installed-packages.txt is stored (on the local machine), and run sudo dpkg --set-selections < installed-packages.txt
4. Run sudo apt-get dselect-upgrade

The process is similar for distributions using different package managers like yum, pacman, or rpm, the concept is the same but the commands will differ slightly. A little net/manual searching will fix you up :P.

- Related helpful articles:

• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BackupYourSystem/TAR
• https://askubuntu.com/questions/7809/how-to-back-up-my-entire-system

DISCLAIMER: I would consider this a LEGACY POST of mine, written a long time ago. Please excuse any typos, errors or lapses in memory/judgement - as it was added to the site from the archives, just to put everything in one place. Thankq for your understanding 🙇‍♀️