Backup Personal Configuration Files

[john_markh]

After I had couple of system crashes, my GNOME configuration were not usable anymore (corrupted files). After number of attempts I've deleted GNOME configuration just to be able to login, I had to reconfigure many applications (Evolution, Network Manager, Nautilus, etc.)
I've decided to write a small script to backup important files. First of all, I've created .backup directory.

mkdir ~/.backup
Then, in .backup directory I've created a file which contain the list of directories needed to backup.

gedit ~/.backup/backup.list

.config
.gconf
.gconfd
.gnome2
.gnome2_private
.gnupg
.evolution
.nautilus
Finally, a small bash script to create compressed tar archive

gedit ~/.backup/backup.sh

#!/bin/bash

# create backup prefix and suffix using date command
preffix=$(date +%F) # %F full date (same as %Y-%m-%d)
suffix='.tar.gz'

# create backup using compressed tar
tar pzcf ~/.backup/$preffix\_backup$suffix -T ~/.backup/backup.list

That's it.
To use the script, all you have to do is to make it executable

chmod +x .~/.backup/backup.sh
and run it

~/.backup/backup.sh

If someone has know which other directories need to be backed up, please...

[chandra]

Assuming that personal config files all start with dot (.) as their first character and a letter as the second character, if instead of

tar pzcf ~/.backup/$preffix\_backup$suffix -T ~/.backup/backup.list
you had

tar pzcf ~/.backup/$preffix\_backup$suffix ~/.[a-z][A-Z]*
I think it would be more comprehensive.

This solution is not foolproof because directories like .mozilla/firefox, and .mozilla-thunderbird, contain more than configuration information. Exclude whatever is unnecessary by using the

--exclude=PATTERN
option.