Backup home for reinstall
What's better for restoring your home folder to a reinstall of bazzite
A tar backup or a clonezilla backup? And then I just cp -a everything
Which will preserve permissions better? Especially considering there are some root owned folders in my home (distrobox and waydroid)
This is how I'm thinking of formatting the tar command
This should backup my home folder included the linuxbrew homebrew folder
This way I keep all apps configs and files from my current bazzite install
But I'm worried because even though this tar command is supposed to mantain permissions last time I tried something like this the sudo tar broke permissions
See https://discord.com/channels/1072614816579063828/1273442214999097435
32 Replies
Welp this went as expected
I ran
And restores with
And I know have a mix of broken permissions
Some (but not all which is really weird) things are root owned when they should be usere owned
And the main folders I wanted root owned waydroid and distrobox are user owned breaking distrobox and waydroid
Is there no way to cleanly keep all my flatpaks .configs ect when reinstalling bazzite?
Lucky I still have a clonezilla backup that has my home folder with the correct permissions
keeping everything would probably result in the sane problem you had initially
rsync -aAXH --info=progress2 to answer your original question
Oh and there is a selinux related flag but idr what it was
I'd love to see an official ublue-os best practice guide for this, as I've been wondering about the same thing. Ideally not only for the home directory, but also OS and app settings and data that might live elsewhere in /etc or /var.
rsync & tools based on it are the gold standard for this purpose. rsync can carry over the entire OS filesystem while preserving all permissons, leaving user only bootloader installation. The catch is bazzite uses selinux so moving files from a non selinux system to a selinux system (ie. Arch to Bazzite, what I did) creates some weird errors. I have done Arch to Arch and it works well.
Well my system boots right. Now with my messed up permissions home folder.
Plasma loads and everything the only thing is permissions are messed up on some things like distrobox so that's not working but the system does boot and work
I guess my best bet is grabbing the stuff with bad permission from my clonezilla backup and Rsync like that
Only problem is a ztsd compromised my clonezilla backup so I can't just mount it
oh wowie
it's highly unlikely that the problem was system files originally
though i don't exactly know how OSTree works
i assume you did try
rpm-ostree resetIt probably was the update I did corrupted something on the system
Yeah I did try a reset
that's the thing
you updating shouldn't corrupt anything on the systen
as it constructs a new system
hence why updates mean a reboot
Something probably went wrong with the update the really strange part was my roll back image was borked too
i wish OSTree was actually documented
And the way it broke was so strange too network manager wouldn't load so there was no internet and
Kernel panics /bsod randomly
I never had a Linux system so royally fucked up before
i use Nix/Nix OS which OSTree is inspired by
but Nix is more understandable
yeah me neither
only weird problem i've had on Nix OS is a single file somehow got incorrect permissions which prevented me from updating for a bit until i fixed it
though it would have fixed itself
if i just waited
due to how Nix OS works it was very simple to fix
i love explaining this concept
basically Nix has this place called the Nix store in
/nix/store
every package file lives here
this folder is read only most of the time
unless you're telling Nix to build a package
in which case an output folder is writable until the package is installed
each output folder has an unique hash
based on it's "inputs"
inputs are it's dependencies
including source code
sha256 hashes of all the paths are recorded in Nix' database
so corruption is simple to catchhaiku is even better
store files are read only & executable
it saves all packages in a directory and instead of installing them, it mounts them at system bootup
whole system is like 500 files
Nix "installs" packages by symlinking their output folder to either the system "profile" or the user profile
user profile?
on haiku package files are never extracted, they stay as packages
yes the user profile is a location in your home folder/$PATH wher files get symlinked so that they could be found easily by your shell or DE or whatever
per user packages, interesting
yup when you run say
nix profile add nixpkgs#htop the nix program asks the Nix daemon running in the background to get that package for you
hence why per user packages are allowed
the nix binary by default doesn't touch the store directly
though it cam of running as root
so you don't NEED a daemon
though for some reason currently you can't tell the daemon to repair the store
so you have to run sudo nix store repair --all to fix all the paths
in case of corruption
be nice if tthe daemon could do this in the background
Nix OS is just another package in the Nix store
it's folder contains symlinks to all system files
the equivalent of usr is system folder/sw
here you'll find bin
share
lib & the rest
there are also other un usual files in the system folder
like one called init & another called kernel & an interesting one called boot.json
init is as you'd expect a symlink to init & kernel is a symlink to the kernel
boot.json is a json file containing the full non symlink paths to both of these
as well as the kernel command line
this is here for somebody who wants to add a bootloader backend
though Nix OS already supports systemd-boot & grub
each system folder has an activate script
this is run at startup by the initrd to create the system sy,mlinks
& (re) generate files in /etc
though this script can do whatever you need to set up a system
this script creates a symlink to the current active system in /run/current-system/ & /run/booted-system
as you\d expect the current system symlink can be changed at runtime
so booted system exists to lead you back to the original
all user profile & system symlinks are accessible in /nix/var/nix/profile
say you installed something to the system & it broke
you can just run sudo /run/booted-system/bin/switch-to-configuration switch
so goes for any other system
the system can also be selected at boot from grub of course
Nix cannot store suid binaries in the store so Nix OS uses /run/security/wrappers to store generated suid wrppers
that run the original no suid binary
in fact Nix doesn't store any special attributes on files in the store
whereas OSTree does
hence why SELinux works
oh this might be what caused the problem
maybe the syslinux file attributes got messed up & OSTree doesn't really look at them so it doesn't know there's anything wrong to fixSomething I just thought of
Bazzite keeps /etc , /home, and /var
On a separate partition
What would happen if I used clonezilla to only restore that partition and keep the rest as is?
donno
though NetworkManager settings are stored in
/etcAccording to chatgpt it might break selinux
oh yeah
Yeah that to if the network manager config was somehow bad it would also copy that
selinux attributes if not correct will cause problems
that's the point of them
Yeah probably not worth it if anything I should mount the clonezilla backup a selectively copy over things I don't want to keep my etc either really
to be an extra layer of security on top of regular permissions
they can act as per process permissions
by default apps run by you can access whatever you can
with SELinux they can only access files that have the correct "context"
for instance let's say you had a web server & some files for it to serve
It's just I was dumb and I zst compressed the clonezilla backup and it also split it into parts
So I have to combine all the parts first . Uncompress that convert the file onto a mountable disk image and then I can mount it and copy things
Clonezilla has a raw disk dump option that would of just spit out a disk image that I could mount should of done that
And then copy over files with Rsync though I'm not sure if selinux would be intact
you could limit the web server to only have access to files of the say www_file context & give those files that context
& boom the server run by you root or anyone else can only touch those specific files
not any of your or root's files
& that is basically what SELinux does
protect your files from possibly malicious/exploitable apps you run
there is
restorecon
it restores the contexts of files
based on where in the filesystem they are
for instance a file in your home folder would gain the home_file context
not sure if it's actually called home_file
but it's something like that
you can ls -Z ~ to see the contexts of files in your home folderits so random what tar makes root owned and what it doesnt my steam folder was restored as root :ConfusedDog: but other folders in .local/share/got owned by user for example .local/share/applications is correctly user owned
so its not even that its inverting ownership or making everything root it just randomly makes some folders root. and im pretty sure my steam folder wasn't root owned
and then some folders that where supposed to be root owned got user owned but again not all some are correctly root owned like this backup i did of a applications settings in /etc/
its so random
acthually arccording to chatgpt what might be happening is its restoreing
.local/share/Steam/blah before the achtual .local/share/Steam folder since i deleted that folder beforing running the restore (in case of conflicts) it created that path and it created it with the running users permision (root) when it finally gets to the top level Steam folder it sees .local/Steam already exists and the default behavior is --no-overwrite-dir so it doesn't change the permisions to the one from the tar.
the solution is to specfiy an order for extraction or enable overwritting dirctors with the copy in tar