Restoring user settings

[dlhamilton]

My work computer is going to be re-imaged . This means they will wipe the drive and load Win 7 taking up the entire drive. Right now I have the drive split with half going to SL and have going to Win 7. What do I need to save so that when I put SL back on, I can have my current files, programs and settings?

Thanks for the advice.

David

[RalphEllis]

You have a few choices.

You can copy just your data files to a disk and not worry about the settings. Evolution can do a back up for emails.

If you copy all of the files in your home directory, including the hidden files, to a disk, you should keep all of your mail and your settings.

You can do a disk image of either your home partition or if you have LVM, your whole SL installation using a utility such as partimage. It will create a disk image of your current installation but I do not know if this an image that can be resized when you try to put it back on the hard drive.
Also make sure that the kernel image that is on the LVM hard drive is the same as you are installing with SL since grub will not be able to find a bootable kernel if there is not an exact match.

Do you have LVM or distinct root and home drives?

[redman]

Short answer: copy/backup everything from your /home directory and after doing a new installation put everything back.

Long answer: if you want to copy everything from your /home directory, do not forget the directories whose name start with a . (like .local, .mozilla, .thunderbird, etc.). All settings of the corresponding programs are in those directories (there are also some files starting with a .). When doing a copy/backup you could get an error with the .mozilla directory telling about one of several filenames being too long. Skip .mozilla and export all your favorites (that is important, the rest of the Mozilla/Firefox settings aren't ).