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A couple of days ago I tried updating from 18.04 to 20.04 using the do-release-upgrade command. Long story short, something went wrong and the system won't boot. It doesn't look like I'll resolve the issue so I think I'll just re-install ubuntu and all my apps instead. Thankfully, I used the 18.04 backup utility as well as copied over everything in the root directory before upgrading. How easy is it going to be to restore my apps and settings with these backups? Can I just copy over everything in /home? What other directories should I copy over?

amourav
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  • Depends upon exactly what you backed up. For example: I back up only data. My applications are trivial to reinstall, so don't need to be backed up. Some 18.04 applications won't work with 20.04, some will. – user535733 Oct 03 '20 at 02:43
  • @user535733 I backed up everything in / (everything I could at least). Is there anything besides data I could restore? Like for example app settings/logins? – amourav Oct 03 '20 at 03:36
  • Application settings are data, and usually stored with the rest of your data. For login accounts, restore /etc. For data, restore /home. Backing up the root directory (/) may present challenges: It makes the backup unnecessarily huge, and restoring older application (which will overwrite the newer) may break your system. There is a small risk in restoring /etc that you may break some applications that keep global settings there. – user535733 Oct 03 '20 at 13:40
  • @user535733 Is there anything in /root that's important? I remember some Docker settings saving things to /root. – amourav Oct 03 '20 at 15:15
  • The /root directory is not normally used in Ubuntu. It's the home of the root account, which is disabled in Ubuntu. – user535733 Oct 03 '20 at 17:30

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