Is there a way to restore home folder to default?

#1

Hi,

I’m currently running Fedora 30 Silverblue and a few weeks ago I accidentally executed rm -rf * in my home folder. I realized quickly what I done and stopped it after few seconds, but damage has been done. Till this time, I’m having a strange issues like not working autostart apps, gnome-software not finding rpm-ostree updates and few others.

I want to rebase to F31 soon, but I would like to first solve this issue. Is there a way to restore the default setting of home folder somehow?

#2

The default home folder is in /etc/skel but perhaps you just need to relabel your home directory.

restorecon -R -v /var/home
#3

Thanks for the /etc/skel folder, I didn’t knew about it.

The SELinux context should be fine I’m just missing some files, that should be in home folder.

EDIT: It looks like /etc/skel folder is empty.

#4

Did you ls -la? Most of the files are dotfiles:

$ ls -la /etc/skel/
total 28
drwxr-xr-x.   3 root root   92 Aug 29 10:10 .
drwxr-xr-x. 164 root root 8192 Aug 29 10:15 ..
-rw-r--r--.   1 root root   18 Aug 29 10:10 .bash_logout
-rw-r--r--.   1 root root  141 Aug 29 10:10 .bash_profile
-rw-r--r--.   1 root root  376 Aug 29 10:10 .bashrc
drwxr-xr-x.   4 root root   39 Aug 29 10:10 .mozilla
-rw-r--r--.   1 root root  658 Aug 29 10:10 .zshrc
#5

I tried only ls -l, but I have problem with GNOME applications and it looks like /etc/skel will not help with this.

Probably the best option is to do backup and reinstall Silverblue.

#6

You could create another user and move to it?

#7

Thanks, your advice gave me an idea.

I created a new user (went through gnome init) and moved the missing files back to my existing user.

It looks like everything is working now. :slight_smile: