Charlie Gibbs <cgi...@surfnaked.ca> writes: > How do the rest of you deal with all the user-added stuff > that vanishes when you do a fresh install?
I don't do fresh installs as a rule, not when changing hardware or shuffling files around like in your case, or when I wanted to switch from MBR partition table to GPT or when otherwise shuffling partitions around. In fact, I find it weird to see people advocate the Windows way of "if in doubt, reinstall". Linux installations are robust and long lived. In fact, Windows is pretty good too, these days. However, my little pizza box kicked the bucket recently so I got an identical replacement. My backups include the output of dpkg --get-selections "*" as recommended in the Debian release notes so putting all the same packages on the replacement box needed just some apt work. I also save the partition table but in the case of a small system it's not an issue. The system specific stuff in /etc and /home I pulled from backups as well.
