bob prohaska  wrote:
> In getting ready to try the latest "full-upgrade" for RaspiOS
> I decided to save a copy of my home directory on another machine,
> just in case the upgrade goes wrong.
>
> It turns out to be a fairly big job, mostly because of dotfiles.
>
> Is there any simple rule of thumb for cleaning up before backing up?
> I'd like to avoid destroying useful things (saved login credentials)
> that notes and memory might not record accurately. The rest can go.
>
Well, in genral, anything in ~/.config and/or files that have a .conf
or .cfg suffix are configuration files for programs you have installed
so are worth keeping if you want to keep your configurations.

Files in .cache directories or with similar suffix are cache files and
just preserve state to speed things up a little so can usually be
discarded.

Then there are .login, .profile, .bashrc, .bash which are
your login and shell environment and configuration.  If you have
changed them you probably want to preserve them.


However, having said all that, I'd recommened copying the whole of
/home out to a backup and then copying it back in after the upgrade.
Restoring cache files won't do any harm.

--
Chris Green
·

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