On 05/02/2018 05:39 PM, Samuel Sieb wrote:
On 05/02/2018 02:24 PM, Temlakos wrote:
One of you (I don't know who it was) shared with me an excellent method of making possible a clean reinstallation of Fedora--going above and beyond the "manual upgrade" described in the Installation Guide, that amounts to erasing the /root directory but leaving alone all other directories, not only /home but /usr, /etc, /bin, /tmp, /var, and any others I might have left out. This method preserves user data on a physically separate filesystem (an HDD or SSD). But it does not mount this separate filesystem as /home. The /home directory remains a part of the main filesystem and gets erased and reinaugurated, just like /usr, /etc, /var, and all the rest of them.

I really don't understand what the benefit of this is.  Your /home directory should be on a separate partition from / and won't be erased even with a full reinstall of the OS.

$ sudo mkdir /crypt

$ sudo mount -t ext4 /dev/sdb2 /crypt

(Here I start with "$ sudo" instead of "#" because to get a "#" prompt I have to execute "su," and that can be dangerous.)

How is "su" dangerous?  Either way you're running a command as root.  I generally use "sudo -i" to get to a root prompt.

The syntax for establishing a symlink is even simpler:

ln -s /crypt/UserName/Dir

where UserName is the name of a specific created user, and Dir is Documents, Pictures, Music, Public, Templates, Videos, and anything else I want to preserve from one iteration of Fedora to the next. Of course I have to remove the "hard" directories that Fedora normally sets up before I execute these link commands.

Are you trying to remove all the user configuration files as well?  If so, then just turn on "show hidden files" in Nautilus and delete the dot directories.  But of course, only do that if you really want to have to reconfigure everything again.

The use of "/crypt" suggests that the original use may have been to only encrypt some parts of the user folders, but that still seems way too complicated to be useful.
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Here is the primary benefit I derived from this method. Each user's home directory has a number of hidden files (whose names begin with a dot) that contain configuration variables. After several iterations of the operating system, errors accumulate in those files. This results as much from the sheer obsolescence of certain configuration files and their parameters as from careless handling of the desktop. In my case, I had several icons of Mozilla Firefox in my system tray that I could not for the life of me remove. Furthermore, a password manager I liked to use, simply refused to load.

Mounting /home on a separate filesystem does nothing to solve the problem of the accumulated errors of configuration. You asked whether I have to reconfigure everything. That's just it: yes. Because especially after several iterations of "dnf system-upgrade," the configuration is a mess!

But mounting user data, like the contents of Documents, Pictures, etc., and even the contents of hidden application-specific directories like .mozilla (for Firefox) and .thunderbird, does eliminate the problem. The errant files get erased with the rest of the filesystem, but the good user data remains.

Now for that matter, I remind you that if you're going to mount a separate file system as /home, you still have to use a command that will make the mounting permanent and not something you have to execute every time you start the system up. So maybe you can tell me what the syntax of the mount command would be for that. I'm sure I can adapt that to the system I borrowed from that other user.

By the way: the danger of "su" is the danger of continuous operations as root, and forgetting that you are in fact logged in as root. Whereas "sudo" gives you superuser privileges for that command only, then reverts you to a non-privileged state. That stops you from deleting a root-owned directory by accident.

Temlakos