11.10 Upgrade and Restoring previous user accounts?

[c69]

I upgraded to 11.10 and find that it has overwritten the account and password information for my primary user account.

The folders are still present (~home/user1/), with all the configuration data for that user, totaling somewhere near 80G of data.

I am tempted to create a new user with the name "user1" and hope that it does not overwrite or delete anything in the existing directory hierarchy, but I'm not expecting to be that lucky. Because I have limited space, it is unadvised that I copy the data at this poiint.

This account has a bunch of developer tools, workspaces, etc configured, so I do not want to alter.

Is there a way I can manually restore this user account?

[MG&TL]

Do you have an external drive?

If I am understanding you correctly,could you not just tarball 'home/user1' (right-click, "Compress...") then copy it to external drive(s), delete /home/user1 and decompress into your directory?


Although it might be an idea to make a system image first, as only having one copy of a file is usually a bad idea.

And no, I wouldn't go around creating new users that conflict with those already there. Did that once and it overwrote my homefolder, then refused to let me login, just got an infinite loop.