i am trying this approach now.
no symlinks - sounds good.
and only git - good, i half know how to use it already.

but the philosophical question remains:

Dot files contain config info for games and software. It's very handy to keep them as it means you will not have to re-configure your favorite programs again if you do a fresh install.

That would require to know for every program you use where in the file tree the dotfile is kept. Not to mention the fact that there are also *.config or *.conf or even entire subdirectories scattered all over the place. No, as long as there is no mandatory place (and structure) for these files the case is hopeless.

I use git. From there, adding in shell or bash script makes it a snap.

A few weeks ago, I was happy with GNU Stow, but we're on the outs right now. No big problems, I just think that it solves a specific problem and if your situation is larger than that it makes sense to use or roll your own tool.
I've found it easy to figure out where each of 12 'dotfiles' ought to go according to documentation. If the docs are wrong the source is always authoritative. Somehow I'll survive.

You can steadily build up a list of the config files you'd want to keep - you may only want to keep a handful. It's far from hopeless but it is tedious. It'd be handy if there was a program that could make it easier to do this.

Short answer: I don't.

Longer answer: I use Clonezilla for my backups therefore Clonezilla takes care of the rest (as far as I know anyway, I hope so, at the very least).

I just found out that there's a GNU program for this.

Managing Dotfiles with GNU Stow

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Neat. Thanks for posting this find .

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I have three systems on my main machine, so I have a common data partition mounted on /home/data. All my $HOMEs are simple directories on the root partitions. The only permanent files they contain are the dot files and directories. They get dumped with the root partition after every update (weekly for Crux, monthly for Debian, once after completion for LFS).

I've got a directory of files: https://github.com/Myk267/dotfiles and a script that makes directories I need, sym-links my files into place, and syncs plugins I use in vim: https://github.com/Myk267/dotfiles/b...ter/install.py. I should probably clone via branch instead of whatever the latest on github is, but here we are.

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Don't know about anyone else, but I plan to start using Ansible for this.

Assuming by "dot files", you mean files in my /home directory. My entire /home/user gets rsync'd to my NAS at least once a day. On Linux, nothing in the OS except for root's .bashrc gets backed up because I don't customize anything in the OS, except for sshd_config. On FreeBSD, I do backup /boot/loader.conf, /etc/rc.conf, /etc/sysctl.conf and my specialized devfs rules, plus my user's /home, if I happen to be using it as a desktop.

I never back up the OS (desktop use case) because it is faster and easier to reinstall. FreeBSD takes me about 10 minutes to install and Linux about the same depending on the distro of the week I happen to be using.

Hi sevendogsbsd. Yes, that's what I meant.

I don't see any option to mark this thread as solved. 🤔❔

Log in and click on "Tread Tools". That should do it.