having needed to wipe and restore my tablet from scratch, to avoid putting back any brokenness in configurations, I've been writing up how to restore it all manually from a file-by-file backup.

http://wiki.maemo.org/ManualBackupAndRestore


hopefully this means my stumbling progress will save others some pain! and maybe hold out hope to other people whose tablets are a bit corrupted and previously didn't dare wipe and restart!

Paul

I'm stuck trying to restore my IM/jabber/SIP accounts and the mail settings. can anyone enlighten me?

I think most of this stuff is stored in:

/var/lib/gconf/apps

You'll probably recognize some of the directory names in there. So, for instance, you could try the following as root:

cp -a <backup dir>/var/lib/gconf/apps/telepathy /var/lib/gconf/apps/telepathy

or maybe:

cp -a <backup dir>/var/lib/gconf/apps/modest /var/lib/gconf/apps/modest

Good luck!

EDIT: see above

Once you got a version somewhat decent on your internal flash, then try complete backup with any partitioned SD, once you got one MMCboot, then follow the same instructions, I think it is cp12wf.sh will clone mmc1 to mmc2 or vice versa. You then end up with 3 boots, intFlashboot, MMC1boot and MMC2boot. From now on, stick with one boot that chosen as default, you can then keep modify this default boot until you like it, then clone to your MMCboot clone for backup, and any time you install something you do not like, you can always snap right back by using the backup clone. Of course, you can also reverse clone to snap the MMCboot back onto the intFlash provided the rootfs is under 514 MB. If bounced off, nothing bad, it just wont boot, till you make the rootfs smaller. This backup is extremely handy for testing new betas. Hope you like it,

bun

aha, minor correction, the directory is var/lib/gconf/apps/telepathy

that solves the problem, I will wiki-ise it :-)

Sorry about that. I'll fix too, thanks.

hmm, i found a directory for modest and copied the files over yet it refuses to recognise any of the accounts... will have to play some more.

so far it's going fairly well, I was worried I'd end up with some weird inconsistencies but apart from mail my n800 is behaving as expected, and the total reflash/clean seems to have made things zippier, and I've got lots of spare space. I've not had a problem with metalayercrawler, but I've ensured I've not put symlinks into the user's home dir which seemed to be one problem.

--edit--
I discovered I had the wrong ownership settings in /var/lib/gconf/apps/modest and fixed them, and also re-copied over /home/user/.modest but still no luck, it still finds an incompletely configured mailbox I put it just to appease the startup wizard.

OK, I think that I can recover modest config and mails - I think they came back but I should have gone to Menu->View and chosen the mailbox - modest didn't have a mailbox selected by default. Maybe someone else who goes throught this process can confirm?

Disclaimer: I'm BRAND new to Maemo & Linux as a whole. Using an N900

Okay so I'm trying to restore my backed up contacts because somehow my contacts dwindled from 1308 to 174 and I'm lost regarding the following:

In the wiki it says to restore the address book, type the following into xterm:

I'm trying to figure out exactly what I need to put in the place of the "user@mytablet:" part

I think its just "user" but I'm not really qualified to "think" anything. I realize this is the OS2008/Maemo 4/Chinook - Diablo forum but I was unable to find a similar wiki for Maemo 5 so can anyone help me here? Or should I not use this method on the n900? Anyone?

Thanks in advance,
Sean

hi, I can fully understand the confusion! on the tablet the logged in user actually is the username "user"

so you would use scp ... user@192.168.1.2...
or similar

you will have to install openssh server to invoke the ssh server on the tablet, or reverse the function and bring up a shell/xterm on tablet and

HTH