Thank you for the reply andreas85!
I ended up deciding to reinstall Manjaro after backing up a few Home directory items, as there wasn’t much “personal files” I had brought into Manjaro yet… other than downloading a couple hundred gigs of Steam games (loving Proton / Steam Play btw!) One big change I noticed after kicking off the Live USB installer was that the wipe/replace install option showed a diff that indicated the cloned fat32 partition did exist but wasn’t “flagged”/labeled an EFI partition. Might have just been a GUI thing, but that caught my attention.
Saving my Home files taught me about sudo chown $USER:$USER /path/to/mountpoint so I could save my files to another ext4 drive during the reinstall. And this also explained why I was getting permissions issues when I tried to use deja-dup or backintime.
So on this fresh install I have TimeShift looking after my boot and non-Home files (default)… and BiT looking after my Home directory… both are rsync based. Interesting that you mentioned Meld, as it was prompted as an option for BiT… such a great diff program that integrated right into BiT… real slick!
I’ve run into another issue though with the second install, and I’m going to save that for another thread, but hopefully people don’t mind if I ask a few more questions about what I’m still learning in this post.
- rsync data copy - what do you make a copy of? do you use rsync to make a copy of all “/” folders/files… or just some select folders files like /home/, /etc/, and your other “special files”?
- can you point me to any links that would teach me more about what data is stored where? Like where the OS resides, where applications/packages and their configs are written, and is only my personal data in /Home/*?
- Special Files… I’m going to reserve grub.cfg and kernels for future learning
- /etc/fstab - I really needed to move past the /run/media/* mountpoints on access (helped tools like BiT access drive on boot if the drive was automounted), so I now understand the importance of this file… weird though that this post suggested systemd mounts are better… yet the Manjaro install populated fstab… its contents were a great template to follow while I followed the post to mount my other drives
- Reinstall All Packages - How do you reinstall packages from a text file? and what generated the text file?