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

sudo tar -cvpf /mnt/DATA/homefolder.tar --xattrs --acls --selinux --numeric-owner -I "zstd -3" -C /var/home .  >> tar-home log

sudo tar -cvpf /mnt/DATA/homefolder.tar --xattrs --acls --selinux --numeric-owner -I "zstd -3" -C /var/home .  >> tar-home log

sudo tar -cvpf /mnt/DATA/homefolder.tar --xattrs --acls --selinux --numeric-owner -I "zstd -3" -C /var/home .  >> tar-home log

sudo tar -cvpf /mnt/DATA/homefolder.tar --xattrs --acls --selinux --numeric-owner -I "zstd -3" -C /var/home .  >> tar-home log

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 🛟bazzite-helptransfer home directroy to another machine (also running bazzite KDE)

zany130OP•8/22/25, 2:54 AM

Welp this went as expected

I ran

sudo tar -cvpf - \
  --xattrs --acls --selinux --numeric-owner \
  -C /var/home/zany130 \
  --exclude='.steam' --exclude='.local/share/Steam' \
  . > /mnt/DATA/homeminussteam.tar

sudo tar -cvpf - \
  --xattrs --acls --selinux --numeric-owner \
  -C /var/home/zany130 \
  --exclude='.steam' --exclude='.local/share/Steam' \
  . > /mnt/DATA/homeminussteam.tar

And restores with

sudo tar -xvpf /media/ubuntu/DATA/homeminussteam.tar \
  --xattrs --acls --selinux --same-owner \
  -C /media/ubuntu/bazzite-deck_fedora/home

sudo tar -xvpf /media/ubuntu/DATA/homeminussteam.tar \
  --xattrs --acls --selinux --same-owner \
  -C /media/ubuntu/bazzite-deck_fedora/home

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

zany130OP•8/22/25, 2:55 AM

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

Zzany130 Is there no way to cleanly keep all my flatpaks .configs ect when reinstalling b...

nagito || Knight of Emilia•8/22/25, 9:10 AM

keeping everything would probably result in the sane problem you had initially

mrvictorywin•8/22/25, 9:45 AM

rsync -aAXH --info=progress2 to answer your original question

mrvictorywin•8/22/25, 9:46 AM

Oh and there is a selinux related flag but idr what it was

bazzite-lightyear•8/22/25, 11:45 AM

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.

mrvictorywin•8/22/25, 12:04 PM

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.

Nnagito || Knight of Emilia keeping everything would probably result in the sane problem you had initially

zany130OP•8/22/25, 1:42 PM

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

Mmrvictorywin rsync -aAXH --info=progress2 to answer your original question

zany130OP•8/22/25, 1:45 PM

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

Zzany130 Well my system boots right. Now with my messed up permissions home folder. Plas...

nagito || Knight of Emilia•8/22/25, 2:09 PM

oh wowie

nagito || Knight of Emilia•8/22/25, 2:10 PM

it's highly unlikely that the problem was system files originally

nagito || Knight of Emilia•8/22/25, 2:10 PM

though i don't exactly know how OSTree works

nagito || Knight of Emilia•8/22/25, 2:11 PM

i assume you did try rpm-ostree resetrpm-ostree reset

zany130OP•8/22/25, 2:11 PM

It probably was the update I did corrupted something on the system

zany130OP•8/22/25, 2:11 PM

Yeah I did try a reset

Zzany130 It probably was the update I did corrupted something on the system

nagito || Knight of Emilia•8/22/25, 2:11 PM

that's the thing

nagito || Knight of Emilia•8/22/25, 2:12 PM

you updating shouldn't corrupt anything on the systen

nagito || Knight of Emilia•8/22/25, 2:12 PM

as it constructs a new system

nagito || Knight of Emilia•8/22/25, 2:12 PM

hence why updates mean a reboot

zany130OP•8/22/25, 2:13 PM

Something probably went wrong with the update the really strange part was my roll back image was borked too

Zzany130 Something probably went wrong with the update the really strange part was my rol...

nagito || Knight of Emilia•8/22/25, 2:14 PM

i wish OSTree was actually documented

zany130OP•8/22/25, 2:16 PM

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

nagito || Knight of Emilia•8/22/25, 2:18 PM

i use Nix/Nix OS which OSTree is inspired by

nagito || Knight of Emilia•8/22/25, 2:18 PM

but Nix is more understandable

Zzany130 And the way it broke was so strange too network manager wouldn't load so there w...

nagito || Knight of Emilia•8/22/25, 2:21 PM

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

nagito || Knight of Emilia•8/22/25, 2:21 PM

though it would have fixed itself

nagito || Knight of Emilia•8/22/25, 2:21 PM

if i just waited

nagito || Knight of Emilia•8/22/25, 2:23 PM

due to how Nix OS works it was very simple to fix

nagito || Knight of Emilia•8/22/25, 2:24 PM

i love explaining this concept

nagito || Knight of Emilia•8/22/25, 2:32 PM

basically Nix has this place called the Nix store in /nix/store/nix/store

nagito || Knight of Emilia•8/22/25, 2:32 PM

every package file lives here

nagito || Knight of Emilia•8/22/25, 2:33 PM

this folder is read only most of the time

nagito || Knight of Emilia•8/22/25, 2:34 PM

unless you're telling Nix to build a package

nagito || Knight of Emilia•8/22/25, 2:35 PM

in which case an output folder is writable until the package is installed

nagito || Knight of Emilia•8/22/25, 2:37 PM

each output folder has an unique hash

nagito || Knight of Emilia•8/22/25, 2:37 PM

based on it's "inputs"

nagito || Knight of Emilia•8/22/25, 2:37 PM

inputs are it's dependencies

nagito || Knight of Emilia•8/22/25, 2:37 PM

including source code

nagito || Knight of Emilia•8/22/25, 2:39 PM

sha256 hashes of all the paths are recorded in Nix' database

nagito || Knight of Emilia•8/22/25, 2:39 PM

so corruption is simple to catch

mrvictorywin•8/22/25, 2:40 PM

haiku is even better

nagito || Knight of Emilia•8/22/25, 2:40 PM

store files are read only & executable

mrvictorywin•8/22/25, 2:40 PM

it saves all packages in a directory and instead of installing them, it mounts them at system bootup

mrvictorywin•8/22/25, 2:40 PM

whole system is like 500 files

Mmrvictorywin it saves all packages in a directory and instead of installing them, it mounts t...

nagito || Knight of Emilia•8/22/25, 2:42 PM

Nix "installs" packages by symlinking their output folder to either the system "profile" or the user profile

mrvictorywin•8/22/25, 2:43 PM

user profile?

mrvictorywin•8/22/25, 2:43 PM

on haiku package files are never extracted, they stay as packages

Mmrvictorywin user profile?

nagito || Knight of Emilia•8/22/25, 2:45 PM

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

mrvictorywin•8/22/25, 2:46 PM

per user packages, interesting

Backup home for reinstall

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