I deleted my /etc !!!!!

[viking60]

Well as you all know backups are for chickens....but yesterday I manged to remove my /etc

Yes I know-- how is it even possible to be that stupid...so here we go;

I had an old backup on my USB drive.
This drive had a backup from my old Arch server and contained the directories /etc and /home

Since I have replaced that server with a Centos server I thought I'd delete those directories....

So cd into the USB drive and did a

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 rm -R /etc

and that of course did not remove the etc directory on the USB drive but the /etc on my main box

Stupid stupid stupid

So suddenly my user was completely gone root was gone and those users were gone even if I chrooted into it with my Viking Rescue system.



Yeah that is bad but I was able to download and burn a Manjaro iso with SystemrRescueCD from our eminent rescue system and burn it to a DVD,

I started the Calamares installer and partitioned manually and had the option to keep the old data so I kept /home as is and also chose "keep" on /

That should replace my missing /etc.

I configured my user with the same data and password as before and was able to boot into my environment.

Every config file is there ('cept those in /etc of course) but I need to reinstall all missing programs.

Let this be a lesson to you

I also have this script that backs up my /home on a daliy basis and in there I have pkglist.txt file that contains all installed packages:

I created it like this:

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pacman -Qqe | grep -vx "$(pacman -Qqm)" > /path/to/chosen/directory/pkglist.txt

I restored it with:

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sudo xargs -a </pat/to>/pkglist.txt pacman -S --needed

That should pretty much save my bacon.....depending on how old that file is....