I backed up my system on Saturday (yesterday), and pulled a stupid. I'll explain.
Normally I hibernate, and while it's hibernated, boot off a thumb drive and back up (either by partition or the whole drive) to a dedicated drive. The idea is if my main drive takes a dump, I could replace it with the backup drive, boot, and be on my merry way. After the backup has completed, I resume and it's right where I left off. So. This time, while the backup was in process, I mounted /home read-only to check something out. Apparently that's not good enough to keep the filesystem intact, because at the end when I resumed, several things in $HOME didn't work right. E.G., some widgets in the panel were misconfigured, T-bird had lost its configuration, and Firefox plugins didn't work. I fixed the panel widgets, T-bird appears to be *mostly* fixed (we'll see if this gets sent as text), but the Firefox plugins are still a mess. The Noscript icon shows up in the row with the hamburger menu, but doesn't show up in Tools → Addons & Themes. Adblocker for Youtube, I'm not sure it's doing anything because I still see ads before a video and I didn't before. So what can I do to fix this, while still keeping my history, cookies, tabs, etc?
