Question about backing up home directory
 

I've saw here many times that it is wise to back up your home directory. Whats the benefit of this? Lets say for some reason I crash and have to reinstall Ubuntu, can I just copy my entire home directory, and then I won't have to reinstall any of my programs, etc?

I keep a pretty good backup of all my files, etc. and can usually have Ubuntu back up and running pretty quickly, I'm just curious if backing up my home directory would save me reinstalling all my software, etc.

Thanks...

IGF

I also use Ubuntu and chose to backup my home directory to another partition so I could install Kubuntu.

The benefit is that regardless of what happens on the other partitions your /home/name data will be safe.

I've read that you can do a similar thing with /opt to keep your programs.

There are many good guides via google which explain in detail how to move your home to a new partition.

Your home directory will contain your work and KDE or Gnome personal settings, but not the programs or system files.

I would recommend using kdar to first perform a full backup of your home directory. Later, performing an incremental backup will not take as long.

You could also use k3b to back up the files. Save the k3b job. The .k3b file is a zip file that contains a "main.xml" file. You could use this file to produce a printable catalog of the files you backed up (using sed to remove the tags and using a2ps or enscript, then ps2pdf to produce a pdf file if that is what you prefer.)

Remember, many of the settings are in hidden files or hidden directories.