Revive corrupt user

[Aldo Foot]

On Fri, Sep 19, 2008 at 2:37 PM, Alex Makhlin <makhlina at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am an IT professional but quite new to Linux. I am using Fedora 9 and a
> few times now, most of which have been my fault, I will experiment and/or
> make some changes that would then give me errors while logged in as my
> personal user or at times I cannot even get to the desktop. The only fix I
> have found is a fix of a novice. I just create a new user, copy all my
> personal files over to the new user, reset all of my preferences, and am
> back up running again. Yesterday after running the latest Fedora updates, I
> could no longer get to the desktop of my personal user so in the end I had
> to go through the same process of creating a new user before I could login.
> But I again had to go through the tedious task of copying my personal files
> and personalising the settings of the new user.
>
> Here is the question: Is there any way to backup my existing user info so
> that I can just restore the backup when I need to and have all of my user
> preferences set the way I left them? I have tried backing up the "Home"
> folder but after restoring it, I still had the same problem.
>
> Any help would be appreciated,
> Alex
>


You need to make sure the hidden files from
the source account get copied to the target
account. If you use tar this is done automatically.

If you use the 'cp' command then change directories
to the source directory and do "cp -r ./.* ../targetDir>"
That only copies hidden files. Do "ls -a <targetDir>" to check.

Notice the syntax--   "./.*"    it's a dot, slash, dot, star.

Then copy no hidden files the normal way.

~af