How to repair/unlock gsettings (or dconf-editor)?

Question

BTRFS is a nice filesystem, except when you are forced to hard reset the system twice in a row. In that case, all recently made changes to the files on the filesystem are broken in one way or another. Among theese there is always the Linux registry, dconf.

So after the computer hard restart, you are left in a state of the broken dconf - all values are forced to the defaults, and you are banned from doing any modification to them.

Removing the whole /home/$USER folder and re-creating it from scratch fixes the problem. But that takes a huge amount of time and loses even more data.

I wonder, if there is a better way to repair or reset the dconf. Preferably with the option to inspect the old values.

I expect, that there is some backup of dconf settings, just like in Windows word.

Answer 1

You can find your user dconf database in ~/.config/dconf, system level values are stored on /etc/dconf. The database are a combination of a fast-read binary file and text files inside a dir with the same name as the database but ended in .d:

I mean default system level values are stored both in /etc/dconf/ibus (a binary file) and /etc/dconf/ibus.d (a directory filled with text files)

You should first check if the problem is in the user or system level files and then delete (or restore) the problematic files.

You should find a backup of your user file (not the system level one) in ~/.config/dconf/, it's named user.XXXXXX where X can be any letter.

You can read the dconf system administrator guide here for more info.

Answer 2

After a little of poking around I've found two files under ~/.config/dconf: user with size 0 bytes, and user.H37S4 with a normal size of several kB.

Deleting the user file, and renaming the user.H37S4 -> user not only healed the registry, but also restored the settings to their previous state.

I've changed those files under virtual terminal while being logged out from the unity and the whole graphical desktop environment.