Backing Up Hidden Directories with SpiderOak on Linux
I use SpiderOak as a third-party personal backup service. I use Kubuntu Linux on my desktop, and I started using SpiderOak specifically because it has great Linux support.
Anyway, SpiderOak gives all their users 2GB of lifetime storage, for free. Besides backing up all your regular documents and everything, you can also back up some important hidden directories, including your Firefox bookmarks and profile, and your KDE settings. Here’s how I did it.
First, you need to display the hidden directories in the SpiderOak client, so you can tell SpiderOak what to back up. To display the hidden directories, click the icon which looks like this, circled in red:
Once you do that, you should see something like this, assuming you’re looking at your home directory:
Your Firefox profile, with all your bookmarks and settings in it, is in .mozilla/firefox. If you select the firefox directory and find that it takes up way more of your backup space than you want, and you use Google’s Gears plugin, try unchecking the “Google Gears for Firefox” folder - that trimmed nearly 700 megabytes off the total space I needed to have backed up.
If you use Pidgin, you’ll want to select the .purple folder. This will back up all of your chat logs.
And, if you use KDE, you’ll probably want to back up your .kde folder. (Your .gnome and/or .gnome2 folders if you use Gnome). The .kde folder is where all of KDE’s settings are kept: font sizes, Kwin settings, panel options, saved Kwallet passwords, Dolphin/Konqueror bookmarks, etc. If your hard drive dies and you need to reinstall, replacing your new .kde folder with your backed-up one will make your KDE look and feel just like it did before your crash. One thing to be aware of: if you use Kmail, Kmail stores all of its mail in the .kde/share/apps/kmail folder. Depending on how much mail you have in there, you may want to uncheck .kde/share/apps/kmail so you don’t go over your SpiderOak limit.
Have any other SpiderOak tips, or important Linux config folders that you always back up that I haven’t mentioned? Let me know in the comments!
Posted on Sep 30, 2009 - 06:15 PM
