On Tue, Mar 07, 2023 at 05:33:45PM +0100, Michael Lee wrote: > Is it possible to reinstall the system and still retain the settings, > logins, etc.?
I'm assuming you already know about /home and have already taken care of it. To answer the question: yes, but not easily. What you'll want to do is make a backup copy of the /etc directory before reinstalling. Then after reinstalling, carefully merge the contents of the old files into the new files. For local login accounts, you care about these files: /etc/passwd /etc/shadow /etc/group Merge the relevant lines (only the accounts *you* added, which correspond to real humans, not the system accounts) from the backup files into the reinstalled files, and use the "id" command and friends to verify that they're working. If you have user crontabs, you will need to move those over as well. The easiest way would be to save the output of "crontab -l" to a file before the reinstall, and then use "crontab < my-saved-file" afterward, for each user account that has a crontab. If you prefer a lower-level approach, the files are in /var/spool/cron/crontabs/. For other "settings", whatever that word means, you'll need to find the relevant files and once again merge contents from the backup version into the reinstalled version. This only applies to system-wide configurations, not to personal settings. Personal settings are in /home and would be taken care of simply by not touching /home during the reinstall. You might want to start by making a list of all the things you care about, which you want to migrate to the new system. Figure out where all of the files are, which pertain to those things. Figure out how you'll merge those files into the reinstalled system. Just having a list, and having gone through the mental effort of researching each thing, can make a big difference.
