Déjà Dup

restore to different distro

Asked by Stewart Moran

Good afternoon Mike,

Figured it would not be to long before I would be contacting you again. Best described as Launchpad #177211. Kind of gives a overview of my current situation. My latest thought, and I am still very much a novice at this, is to just do a complete new install of either Ubuntu 11.10, or Mint 11. I have very little of great importance stored on Ubuntu currently, except I would sure like to keep my documents folder intact, and Thunderbird mail. Question I have is how would I back these items up, and if I decide to go with mint, will I be able to restore them. Have one finance application, skrooge, which I really would prefer not to lose the data I have entered. Would I have to install skrooge, and than restore?

I know, and I am sorry, another no knowledge newbie, but any suggestions would sure be appreciated.

Thanks

Stewart

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Déjà Dup Edit question
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Michael Terry
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Best Michael Terry (mterry) said : 		#1

So if you choose to reinstall from the CD, it will keep everything in /home intact (i.e. it won't delete your user data, just all your system packages will be upgraded). So that might already be safe enough.

But if you want to be doubly sure, I'd say make your backup and when you want to restore, you don't have to worry about whether you install skrooge first or backup first. Either order should be safe.

You can still restore on Mint even though the backup was made in Ubuntu. You may have to install Deja Dup first though, as I don't recall if Mint ships with it by default or not.

Revision history for this message
Stewart Moran (stewart-1envelope) said : 		#2

Good afternoon Mike,

Backed up Home folder, and did a clean install of Ubuntu 11.10. Restored from USB drive and everything kind of works. Ubuntu Unity seems to have no issues and is working fine. Can go to download manager and after a couple of hiccups, that seems to be working ok. When I switch to the Ubuntu Gnome 3 desktop, it does not seem to be working quite right, just cannot but my finger on what is going on with it. When I switch to Ubuntu Classic, I still get those missing dependencies etc messages. Other strange thing is in both of the Gnome interfaces, when I try to open my home folder Ubuntu Software Center opens and has a message that folder "" is not a program. I backed up home folder in Ubuntu Classic because at the time that was the only interface that I could use. It appears that in addition to the data that I wanted to keep, it also included the data that I did not. Getting used to unity so all is good, just at some point would like to try a fully fuctional Gnome 3 as I have read some interesting reviews.

Thanks again for your help

Stewart