From time to time I boot from ISO files saved in my hard disk. It boots and executes much faster than the live-cd. I would like to save a minimum configuration so that I don't have to configure it each time. I tried "rsync -av" the user's home and then compressing it to bz2, but it didn't work well. When I extracted the bz2 it gave me a few errors, even though I copied the extracted files to replace the user's home but somethings were not configures and the most strange thing was that .gvfs directory appeared without "w" permission for the owner (that is 500). To my surprise not even root can chmod it nor write anything in there. I don't know the reason, maybe I have to do the backup and/or the restoring of files from out the user.
I would like to save mainly: keyboard layout config mouse and touchpad configs wireless settings browser's bookhemarks and a few other programs (like terminal) configurations
so that I can easily configure the system the next time I boot from exactly the same ISO file.
What I did was:
rsync -av /home/ubuntu /media/BACKUP (which is a different partition)
and then
tar -jcvf /media/BACKUP/ubuntu-isoconfig.bz2 /media/BACKUP/ubuntu
and then extract with the archive manager and replace with rsync.
Just, for the record, the .gvsf/ directory behaviour:
$ ls -dl .gvfs/
dr-x------ 2 ubuntu ubuntu 0 ene 26 14:43 .gvfs/
$ sudo chmod 700 .gvfs
chmod: cannot access `.gvfs': Permission denied
...............
mikewhatever: I have skiped .gvfs and after restoring the original home directory, I only see the backgrouns, the folders and firefox bookmarks restored, NOT THE KEYBOARD nor the network manager sttings which I have done without root permits.