Formatted the wrong drive

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nadebula.1984
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Joined: 05/01/2018

I planned to format an external drive but actually wiped out the internal one.

Reinstalling the operating system doesn't take me very long. Then I'll have to restore one of my offline backups.

panties
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Joined: 02/02/2021

> I planned to format an external drive but actually wiped out the internal one.

I'm sorry to hear that.

> Reinstalling the operating system doesn't take me very long. Then I'll have to restore one of my offline backups.

How do you concretely make the offline backup and restore it? :)

nadebula.1984
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Joined: 05/01/2018

If your /home directory isn't very big (e.g., no more than 100 GB), you can simply backup it using tar. However, if you need efficient random access (i.e., browse and extract part of its contents), you could try squashfs (install the package squashfs-tools and use the mksquashfs command). You can also combine the archiving operation with compression. A fast algorithm such as zstd is recommended.

Backup using tar with zstd fast compression on removable storage media:

tar -cvf - ~ | zstd --fast > /media/username/mountpoint/archive.tar.zst

Restore said tarball:

zstd -cd /media/username/mountpoint/archive.tar.zst | tar -xvf -

panties
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Joined: 02/02/2021

It seems that after you build a new Trisquel FDE system, you are trying to replace only the home folder you had backed up with the empty home folder on that new system. But does this work?
I have tried to do this kind of thing before and it failed. I'm not sure why, but I'm assuming it's because the /home of the previous system I backed up was for some reason incompatible with the new system. Well, you can try it, but it's hard to do a fresh install again for that, so
I'll save the archive I just created with tar -cv /home to an encrypted drive and try it when I get a chance which I don't wish.

Magic Banana

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I am a translator!

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Joined: 07/24/2010

It works. Maybe the problem you faced dealt with permissions. Maybe the user id who did the backup did not match that of the user of the newer system (what 'sudo chown' can solve). The actual incompatibilities you may encounter relate to the versions of the programs. In particular, a newer version of a program may not understand its configuration file (typically in ~/.config), written by an older version of it.

nadebula.1984
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Joined: 05/01/2018

Maybe there are conflicts among the configuration files. Maybe there are permission or user/group mismatches. Maybe you have set the /home directory as "private".

I make full backups every two or three weeks so there aren't big differences between package versions, and therefore it's less likely to have configuration conflicts.

panties
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Joined: 02/02/2021

> It works.

I don't think so.