Backup question

[David Woolley]

Eric Bernier wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Thanks for your time.
> 
> I want to reinstall Ubuntu because he's really slow by now.  I try to find
> the .purple directory or the file you say but after severall minutes trying
> to find it...  nothing.
> 
> Where are these files or folder?
> 1- They are on MY computer?
> 2- They are in "Systeme de fichiers"...  maybe "system files" in English?

These are abstractions created by the GUI.  The second one may actually 
be the directory "/", and the English is probably "file system".

> 3- They are in "bin, dev, home, lib, opt, proc, root, sys, usr, var, ..."?

On a Unix system, you would expect to find files and directories 
beginning with ".", and personal to a particular user, in 
/home/<username>.  More precisely, they should be in the directory named 
by the environment variable $HOME, at the time the program is run. 
Conventionally the initial "." causes them to be hidden from directory 
listings, and is used to avoid cluttering listings with lots of 
configuration data files.

I'm afraid this information is so well known to traditional users of 
Unix, that one would not normally expect to have to explain it, however 
netbooks and other Linux distributions trying to mimic Windows are 
probably raising a generation that only knows the GUI abstractions, 
which vary from abstraction to abstraction, even if the same version of 
pidgin will work with all of them.
> 
> 4- They'll give me information or I copy and paste after that I had
> reinstalled everything?

Copy them.
> 


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David Woolley
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