Re: The /crypt method to support habitual clean installs of Fedora without losing data

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On 05/02/2018 02:24 PM, Temlakos wrote:
One of you (I don't know who it was) shared with me an excellent method of making possible a clean reinstallation of Fedora--going above and beyond the "manual upgrade" described in the Installation Guide, that amounts to erasing the /root directory but leaving alone all other directories, not only /home but /usr, /etc, /bin, /tmp, /var, and any others I might have left out. This method preserves user data on a physically separate filesystem (an HDD or SSD). But it does not mount this separate filesystem as /home. The /home directory remains a part of the main filesystem and gets erased and reinaugurated, just like /usr, /etc, /var, and all the rest of them.

I really don't understand what the benefit of this is. Your /home directory should be on a separate partition from / and won't be erased even with a full reinstall of the OS.

$ sudo mkdir /crypt

$ sudo mount -t ext4 /dev/sdb2 /crypt

(Here I start with "$ sudo" instead of "#" because to get a "#" prompt I have to execute "su," and that can be dangerous.)

How is "su" dangerous? Either way you're running a command as root. I generally use "sudo -i" to get to a root prompt.

The syntax for establishing a symlink is even simpler:

ln -s /crypt/UserName/Dir

where UserName is the name of a specific created user, and Dir is Documents, Pictures, Music, Public, Templates, Videos, and anything else I want to preserve from one iteration of Fedora to the next. Of course I have to remove the "hard" directories that Fedora normally sets up before I execute these link commands.

Are you trying to remove all the user configuration files as well? If so, then just turn on "show hidden files" in Nautilus and delete the dot directories. But of course, only do that if you really want to have to reconfigure everything again.

The use of "/crypt" suggests that the original use may have been to only encrypt some parts of the user folders, but that still seems way too complicated to be useful.
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