On 12/18/2017 12:13 PM, stan wrote:

On Mon, 18 Dec 2017 06:23:13 -0500
Temlakos <temlakos@gmail.com> wrote:

As I thought. Now may I also assume that you use the chown command to 
re-create the ownership and group-membership structure of each
specific user directory in the new drive? And also use chmod to
re-create the permissions structure? I'm familiar enough with chown
and chmod. I've used them often enough in my days as a volunteer
developer on other sites that use UNIX.

Yep.

In any event, let me guess: whatever you create and set in the new 
drive, no re-installation will ever alter. Thereafter you remove any 
directories in /home/user (where /user/ is the name of a user
account) and re-establish the links, right?

Yep.

All good. Thanks for confirming.

I should have figured one thing: I do this for everything that I used
to copy over from one computer to the next when I would break in a
new(er) computer with (of necessity) a fresh (first!) installation of
Fedora. That included all the named directories, any other top-level
directories I created, and /home/user/.thunderbird in every account
that used Thunderbird regularly. (Same with Kmail, for any KDE user
who uses the "native" browser and e-mail client.)

As Tim points out, this can cause problems if configuration options
have changed.  Better to just let the newer version create its own
config, try the app, and if it works the way you want, leave it the way
it is.  If it doesn't work the way you want, do a diff with the old
config to see what has changed, and make changes in the new config
based on those.

Well, I've identified one application, the configuration of which I must preserve in some fashion, and that is: Thunderbird. At a minimum, I need to preserve a folder that has e-mail accounts and saved mail databases on it. Otherwise, I lose more than some minor, out-of-sight configuration. And when I have as many as twenty e-mail accounts or more, I cannot afford to have to re-list them all.

The simplest method is to move the .thunderbird folder onto the new drive and link to it from the system drive. The not-so-simple method is to copy out the particular folder and move it into .thunderbird. Or maybe to go into .thunderbird on the system drive and make a symlink inside that folder to the e-mail accounts folder on the new drive. Maybe I'll try that. You can be sure I'll back everything up--I'm getting a portable HDD with 4 TB of capacity that I'm going to use as an all-around system backup.

Temlakos