On Mon 25 Nov 2024 at 22:03:33 (-0800), Charlie Gibbs wrote: > But, as I expected, all my stuff is gone. Well, sort of. > I plugged the hard drive back in, and all my files are > there. But there are no icons left on the desktop - no > more Portal, and none of the utilities I downloaded were > on my $PATH. > > How do the rest of you deal with all the user-added stuff > that vanishes when you do a fresh install? Are there some > tricks I can use, rather than painstakingly re-installing > all my utilities one by one? I assume you can just copy > the old /home over to the new drive (although in my case > I'll be leaving the big music and video directories on the > spinning rust, to be accessed at a new mount point that I'll > add to /etc/fstab). But that does nothing about all the > nifty utilities that were in (e.g.) /usr/bin (even though > the configuration files are probably in /home).
You have the perfect opportunity not to repeat the mistake of scattering these nifty utilities about, whatever they are, or comingling them with the Debian system. Knowing nothing about where you got them, and in what form, you could either repeat installing them, or just copy the binaries across, but keep them separate from Debian by placing them in any of /opt, /usr/local/bin, ~/.local/bin or ~/bin as appropriate. /usr/local/ will already have other subdirectories besides bin/, and you can create similar ones under ~/.local/bin/. Cheers, David.
