I’m replacing the Hitachi HDD in my Thinkpad with a Crucial 2TB SSD. I’ll be installing a fresh Leap 15.3 to its own partition, with /home on a separate partition.
Will I be able to restore all my folders/files from my /hom backup into the new /home on the SSD while the system is live? Thanks!
As long as none of the users that have their data in /home is logged in, yes.
Following up.
I switched to the root user account and was unable to reload my Back in Time snapshots, despite following various advice threads online, even the FAQ on Back in Time’s site. So I logged in again as user, restored all the files, of course had a “restore permissions FAILED” message pop up. However, spot checked a handful of files and the permissions look OK? So far the system runs without issue.
Well, I am a little confused on what to say.
First let me congratulate you with the fact that you seem to have succeeded in what you wanted to achieve.
But.
In you first post above, you had a very general question, on which you got a very general answer.
The question was about a /home partition (which I interpreted as a file system for /home stored on a partition). Now it seems that you have restored files owned by a specific user from a backup, nothing about restoring a file system at all. You never informed us about that fact. Nor that you are using a specific backup tool (Back in Time). So my answer was not based on that missing information (how could it have been, not being clairvoyant).
And on your report on what you did, you say "I switched to the root user account ". But you do not explain what you mean with that. On Unix/Linux, there are many ways do do the same thing. Thus even if "I switched to the root user account " would have been a very well defined action (which it is not), the way you achieved that is still unknown by us.
When i said (admitted also rather general) “As long as none of the users that have their data in /home is logged in”, I mean that no user should be logged in, and indeed that root should log in (after all, manipulating file systems can only be done by root) But as root of course should never use the GUI, that would thus mean a login of root from the CLI/console. I would never describe that as “switching to the root account”.
As I do not have any experience with Back in Time, I have no idea why root can not restore files from it’s “snapshots”.
Same for the peculiar problem “restore permissions FAILED”, which you seem to think is rather normal.
So please, next time you ask for help here, do explain much, much more on what you use and what you (try to) do with it. Never assume that others use “of course” the same ways of running a system as you do, nor that they can read minds.
Hello Henk,
Thanks for your attention to my posts. I apologize for sloppiness in my initial query. My followup was not meant as a criticism of your reply :-).
Going forward I’ll take more care with specifics.
Cheers,
John