Saving home directory during upgrade

[Don]

I think I just need some reassurance. I'm about to go from 16.04 to 18.04.1. On my box as it stands, /Home is in a separate partition from /. I want to do a fresh install rather than an upgrade. Am I correct that if, when I'm installing from the DVD, I keep the partition table the same and just install 18.04 on what's now the 16.04 partition without formatting the /Home partition, then despite what Thomas Wolfe said, I can go /Home again? That would preserve all my data and my VM.

I've tried copying the contents of /Home onto a separate hard drive, but nothing will copy even though the other drive is mounted.

Thanks, all.

[jglen490]

With a /home directory that is on a separate partition from the / directory partition, you COULD assume that a fresh install of 18.04.1 would not affect the /home partition. All it takes a moment of inattention and the wrong checkbox selected and all bets are off, and your data could be toast.

ALWAYS backup your important data, especially before doing an OS upgrade.

There are a bunch of backup solutions in the repos, including command line as well as GUI. I use rsync, but there are lots of ways to do it. If you are having a hard time copying data to a target drive, then chances are there are permissions problems on the target. When I rsync my /home, the target drive is attached using USB. I have three drives and use external USB enclosures, each drive is formatted to include a label (i.e., Backup1, Backup 2, ...). When attached, the label shows up in Dolphin and also /media.

I don't use anything via VM, so I can't help you there.

That's my solution, others will have different solutions, and perhaps better ones.

[Don]

Thanks!! jglen. How do I change permissions on the target drive? I'm the only user of the system. I know how to change permissions for directories, folders, and files that are on my internal HDs, but not how to pull up the permission information for an external hard drive.

[jglen490]

When it's mounted, you can see the permissions on the command line.

As an example, here's my Backup2 drive mounted on /media with my /home backup:

john@john-Desktop:/media/john/Backup2/home$ ls -al
total 20
drwxr-xr-x  5 root root 4096 Aug  4 19:33 .
drwxr-xr-x  3 john john 4096 Sep 24 17:47 ..
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root   44 Aug  4 19:29 .directory -> /etc/kubuntu-default-settings/directory-home
drwxr-xr-x 26 john john 4096 Sep 24 05:22 john
drwx------  2 root root 4096 Aug  4 19:29 lost+found
drwxr-xr-x  9 john john 4096 Sep 22 19:40 multimedia

Some things are owned by root, others by john (my user). I could have changed root to john for all of it, but there are system reasons for not doing that. When I run the rsync command, I do it using sudo in order to capture everything and write it to the drive whole respecting the system permission needs for /media. I keep the rsync commands in a text file, so I copy and paste to keep it consistent and correct every time.

This is how Dolphin looks.

[Don]

jglen, you have saved me lots of worry and countless hours. And I've learned a lot about Kubuntu in the process. Are you a teacher by any chance? Because I surely owe you tuition.

[jglen490]

No, I'm not. But, Paypal works
jk ...