[sf-lug] Today's meeting Sunday 2 March 2014 -- archiving using GUI

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Jim Stockford (jim at systemateka.com):

>     Bill wants his old Firefox bookmarks back.
> He upgraded from ubuntu 10.* to Ubuntu 12.04
> and discovered that his /home/<him>/ directory
> seems completely empty.
>     Firefox bookmarks are listed in
> /home/<him>/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/bookmarkbackups
>     It seems that Bill's problem could have been
> addressed by backing up his home directory
> before running destructive processes (such as
>  upgrading).
>     I don't know what GUI program (Ubuntu 12.04)
> can archive ("make a tarball") files in a directory
> tree (e.g. /home/bill/ ).

Great news!  xterm is a pretty bitmapped program. ;->   Open an xterm
(or GNOME Terminal, or whatever).

cd /home/bill  #normally already a default location
ls -al

Get to know bash at least to a very basic extent, as the tinY effort
will be richly rewarded.

Firefox on Linux stores a user's bookmarks as a single file in a
'hidden' directory inside the user's home directory, 

/home/[username/.mozilla/firefox/[profile hash value]/bookmarks.html

The 'profile hash value' is a random ASCII string generated when the
user first fires up Firefox.

Your friend Bill claims, as quoted by you,  that 'his home/<him>/
directory is completely empty', but one is obliged to wonder, what does
that really mean?  Some unspecfiied graphical file browser showed
nothing?

If so, then that might mean less than you and Bill think it does.
Graphica file browsers are often preconfigured to ignore so-called
'hidden' files and directory trees, which in Unix merely means any
files/directories whose names begin with a dot.

Such as, for example, a .mozilla subdirectory in his home directory.

Now, you might choose to think 'Ah!  I need to work with Bill to change
his graphical file browser's default settings and make it willing to
show so-called "hidden" files and directories.'  However, another
solution is to figure out how to open an xterm (or GNOME Terminal, etc.)
and type 'ls -al'.

Do whatever you think is more fruitful.