Restore Ubuntu /home into new Linux Mint Solved

[eastrader]

I have several pc's I am moving from Windos to Linux. I tried both Mint and Ubuntu for several months and decided on Mint. Before I installed on the Ubuntu pc, I did a back up on an external drive as per reading post on the forum. However now that I have wiped and installed Mint on the pc, "Backups" on Mint never see the files on the ext drive. Googling around I found one that said to try install Ubuntu Archive, and did. only that just unpacks the files into yet another format , again Mint does not see..
Has anyone done this successfully? I would hate to lose work I had under Ubuntu. Thanks

[Spearmint2]

Can you use the file manager and see the files?

[WharfRat]

eastrader,

I'm not sure I can be of much help with this as I don't use any archiving backup utilities, but what you might want to try is archivemount.

It's supposed to support a number of popular archive formats and mounts the archive to a mount point for access to the content.

Good luck

[mrmajik45]

If you have a Gparted Backup: Boot off a live disc. Plugin the backup drive and open gparted and click on your drives home Partition and click restore then select the backup and wait for it to restore then reboot and sorry if this breaks your partition.

[Flemur]

If you have a Gparted Backup: Boot off a live disc. Plugin the backup drive and open gparted and click on your drives home Partition and click restore then select the backup and wait for it to restore then reboot and sorry if this breaks your partition.

That's terrible advice.

[Flemur]

I have several pc's I am moving from Windos to Linux. I tried both Mint and Ubuntu for several months and decided on Mint. Before I installed on the Ubuntu pc, I did a back up on an external drive as per reading post on the forum. However now that I have wiped and installed Mint on the pc, "Backups" on Mint never see the files on the ext drive. Googling around I found one that said to try install Ubuntu Archive, and did. only that just unpacks the files into yet another format , again Mint does not see..

See if I have this straight:
- you had ubuntu installed, created some files w/ubuntu and backed up those files to an external drive.
- then you wiped ubuntu and installed mint.
- you want to get the files from backup -> mint.

Q1: what kind of files are in the backup? System settings (login info)? Or regular data (mp3, movies)?
You probably DON'T want to recover system settings en-masse from a different - tho similar - OS.

Q2: what software - ubuntu, I suppose - did you use to back up the files?

Has anyone done this successfully? I would hate to lose work I had under Ubuntu. Thanks

Things are a lot simpler if you backup by copying files (regular copy, or "rsync") rather than using some package that puts the backup in some weird file.

"Backups" on Mint never see the files on the ext drive.

How about posting an "ls -l" on those backup files?

[mrmajik45]

If you have a Gparted Backup: Boot off a live disc. Plugin the backup drive and open gparted and click on your drives home Partition and click restore then select the backup and wait for it to restore then reboot and sorry if this breaks your partition.

That's terrible advice.

What you got against my advice?

[Flemur]

If you have a Gparted Backup: Boot off a live disc. Plugin the backup drive and open gparted and click on your drives home Partition and click restore then select the backup and wait for it to restore then reboot and sorry if this breaks your partition.

That's terrible advice.

What you got against my advice?

You don't know that he backed up an entire partition, or that /home is a partition - if I followed your instructions it would wipe the "/" partition (home is a directory) and replace it with two different OS's and music and movies because my backups are just copies of files in directories, and two backed up OS's and data are all on the same backup partition.

[mrmajik45]

Touche buddy I thought home was a separate partition. Well it is on ubuntu.

[eastrader]

This is no longer an issue, OBTW I had only backed up /home no system files. It is not an issue since I just gave up on it after trying all the advise. I think in the future I will get a "generic" backup program that will work across other distro's vs depending on the one I have installed.

[acerimusdux]

I would just open a terminal and do this from the command line. It's not clear to me whether Mint is even mounting your external partition. Use the command df to list all the mounted partitions. If it is, you should be able to use the "cd" command to change directories to the mount point listed. If it were mounted at "/mnt/external" for example, you would cd /mnt/external. From there, you should be able to see whatever backup files are there with ls -la. The -a flag is to include any hidden files, the -l for long listing to show owner:group and permissions.

What's next depends on what you find. It may be that you aren't seeing things in file manger due to permissions issues. Mint might see these files as owned by another user. You would have to change the ownership with chown and possibly permissions with chmod. Likely the backup utility was compressing these files in an archive format, and you will see a file with an extension like ".tar.gz" or ".tar.bz2". Rather than learn all these commands (chown, chmod, gunzip; which you could do with the man command...such as man chmod), I think I would just install midnight commander with sudo apt install mc. Then run mc and use the F2 menu to get to the unzipping command, and if you need to change ownership or permissions, run it as root sudo mc and use the F9 drop-down menu and arrow keys to move to the "file" menu.