kontact weirdness

[przxqgl]

i'm upgrading my box... the system (trusty) is staying the same, but i've got a new box, with more RAM and a bigger internal hard disk.

before starting the upgrade, i made a complete backup of my /home directory. i installed the new system and got it running. i dumped the backup back into my home directory, fired up kontact, and...

nothing. 8/

i still have the default-installed kontact instance, with none of my accounts or email. i'm getting a bit anxious. i'm not to the "worrying" stage yet, because i still have the backup on a separate USB drive, but it doesn't do me any good if i can't access it.

please help. thanks!

[vinnywright]

I do not use Kontact ,,,,,,,but when you say "i dumped the backup back into my home directory" what exactly do you mean ?

for that to have any chance of working you would (if the backup was of /home/you) half to overwrite /home/you in the new install with the /home/you backup.

not just extract it somewhere in /home/you,,,,,,,,+ it should have the same user ID "UID" and name

VINNY

[przxqgl]

I do not use Kontact ,,,,,,,but when you say "i dumped the backup back into my home directory" what exactly do you mean ?

i mean that i extracted my tar-gzipped archive into the /home/me directory, and overwrote everything.

+ it should have the same user ID "UID" and name

that may be a problem... i don't know what the UID is on the old computer, although it is the same username.

[vinnywright]

it should be the same ,,,,,,,,,, *buntu defaults to UID of 1000 for the first user on the system

you can check what your is with

id name

where "name" is the user name ,,,,,,,,,I think their may be some tar options that half to be used to preserve these on a compression and/or extraction ,,,,,,But I do not do this ,,,,so not sure what thay are !

VINNY

[elijathegold]

How did you make the archive?

[przxqgl]

UID=1000 which probably means that UID=1000 on the old machine, as well, since it was running essentially the same operating system...

[przxqgl]

i made a bash script that did a tar -cvf on my /home/user directory, and stored it on an external USB drive. i then used cron to schedule it every two weeks.

[elijathegold]

i made a bash script that did a tar -cvf on my /home/user directory, and stored it on an external USB drive. i then used cron to schedule it every two weeks.

I used tar for backups a long time ago, I use backintime now which uses rsync under the hood, I found that using tar -Pcf myhome.tar /home/elijathgold/* wouldn't backup hidden files and directories but tar -Pcf myhome.tar /home/elijathgold would. I don't know if this would have changed by now but can you look in the archive using tar -t /full/path/to/archive.tar.gz | less or your preferred GUI to see if hidden files have been included?

[przxqgl]

I use backintime now

i have been unable to get backintime to work, but i haven't tried it on my new machine... i prefer to get things up and running correctly before setting up things like that.

see if hidden files have been included?

tar -cvf includes all hidden files and directories.

[elijathegold]

Yeah I know but the /* at then end prevented it from doing so

[przxqgl]

and it didn't include the /* ... i gave it

tar -xvf /media/USB-drive/<date>-<hostname>.tar /home/user

and it gave me all the hidden files, which i can see in the archive.

[elijathegold]

The next check is have they been restored to your hard drive. ls -al will show all files, their permissions, owner and group.

BTW if these commands are "teaching granny to suck eggs" as my mum used to say then please say so. I don't really know what that means either!

[przxqgl]

ls -la showed all of the hidden files and directories, which also show up in dolphin when i use the "Show Hidden Files" button. as far as i can tell, they're mostly there... significantly, a missing directory is /.kde/share/apps/kmail which is where my mail is hidden away. also, there doesn't appear to be anything in the directories that are not hidden, with the exception of my dropbox (which doesn't work)...

[przxqgl]

and, when i went into the archive and specifically extracted ~/.kde/share/apps/kmail it spun around and said that it was extracting around 1,200 files, but when it was done, it was still not there...

so i used kdesudo ark, opened the archive and extracted ~/.kde/share/apps/kmail and it spun around and said that it was extracting around 1,200 files, but when it was done, STILL it was not there...

what 8/

[elijathegold]

What happens if you run tar -zxvf mytar.ball.tar.gz .kde/share/apps/kmail from the command line?