lost all personal settings Lucid 5.28

[mikegt4]

While surfing the net today a block popped up on the screen for about 2 seconds with a message about "pin..." (didn't get the rest) and then my screen flashed and my desktop went to a blank grey with just the "drive" icons which were stacked in one location. The strip along the bottom changed to a different theme (base Lucid 528) as did the pop up menus. I had changed to a different theme and desktop photo years ago and I don't remember the details.

Stupid me shut down normally which saved the settings to my sfs file. When I rebooted all I get is the base Lucid 528, all my personal settings, email, programs are gone.

Years ago, while using an earlier Puppy version there was a directory somewhere that held the "2nd to last" saved sfs file that one could revert to for just such an occasion. Sadly I am a greybeard with little tech knowledge and a short memory and can not remember were the directory is located (if it even exists in Lucid).

Can anyone tell me how to recover my personal settings?

[Latitude]

The message you describe relates to the "Pinboard". Puppy doesn't have a desktop directory, instead it has a pinboard. What you describe happened to me once and soon afterwards I discovered my hard drive was knocking on death's door. I never worked out if the two things were related, but ever since I've always made sure that my Puppy "savefile" is backed-up in a few different places.

[nic007]

It's a good idea to do a customized remaster once you have your personal settings set up and installed all your favourite programs. This way your remastered base sfs will be very close to the way you want your operating system to be and there is no risk of corruption (if frugal install as the base sfs is read-only). I've been using my customized remaster (frugal install) for a long time now even without using a save file. If you want to change the odd personal setting, keeping a very small save file for that purpose is the way to go. My save file (if I want to use one) is normally not biggger than 32MB. Keep a back-up of this small save file

[Latitude]

Keeping a copy of your Savefile achieves the same thing and with the size of USB Flash Drives these days, keeping a copy of a 512 MB Savefile is no great hardship.

[nic007]

Keeping a copy of your Savefile achieves the same thing and with the size of USB Flash Drives these days, keeping a copy of a 512 MB Savefile is no great hardship.

Waste of space and greater chance of corruption the bigger the save file. I tend to go for the safest option. Not using a save file will always be safer than using a save file because a customized remastered sfs is read-only but a save file is read/write with the chance of getting corrupted. So no, you do not achieve the same effect.

[bigpup]

Try this:

May not have the backup file for PuppyPin, but if you do.

Try this to replace file:
Go here in Rox file manager.

/root/choices/rox-filer/

You will see two files.
PuppyPin and PuppyPin.bak
Delete PuppyPin
Rename PuppyPin.bak to PuppyPin
Reboot computer.

[Latitude]

Something weird's going on. Yesterday I experienced the same problem as mikegt4. I was surfing the Web when the screen flickered and I lost my Wallpaper and drive icons. After recovering from backup I followed nic007's advice to remaster a Puppy CD with all my favourite stuff in it and run a minimal Savefile.

[mikegt4]

thanks to all that replied.

Today I used Win7 to access this forum and read all of the replies. My home WiFi does not work with any Linux except with Ethernet hardwire (confirmed by the installer as the way it is) and using Win7 is such a pain.

I followed bigpup's advice but found no PuppyPin.bak file even with a search. The good news is that all my e-mail and internet browser settings have returned. The desktop has still reverted to the base Lucid 528 settings but my important stuff is intact.

I did find a sfs backup file from a couple of months ago, now I need to backup more often. Internet surfing is probably 95% of my computer use. With my inability to use Puppy for wireless use in the house I end up with 2 favorites files (one for Win7, one for Puppy, both using the Opera browser) which has been a stumbling block for me in an effort to have one save file with all of my latest internet addresses. I have not been able to combine both favorites lists into one with no redundancy. I did it once a few years ago with a windows program that I haven't been able to find again.

I have been looking at the Pbackup program, would this be a good auto backup program for me?

Thanks again for everyone's input.
mike

[puppyluvr]

Hello,
Seems to be the theme today!!
Assuming you have not overflowed your savefile?
Must be corruption.
Reboot "pfix=ram, fsck"
Open a terminal. Enter:
"e2fsck /*"
Where * is the path to your savefile.
EX: "e2fsck /mnt/sda1/pupsave.2fs"
Reboot...

[nic007]

Something weird's going on. Yesterday I experienced the same problem as mikegt4. I was surfing the Web when the screen flickered and I lost my Wallpaper and drive icons. After recovering from backup I followed nic007's advice to remaster a Puppy CD with all my favourite stuff in it and run a minimal Savefile.

Hi, Latitude. Have you been able to capture all your customizations with the remaster? I made a script for an unattended, customized remaster which can be used as alternative to puppy's builtin script. See: http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=94759

[Latitude]

Hi nic007,
Everything is in my pup_525.sfs file except for about 40 MB of non-essential settings (stuff which is nice to have, but which I could live without if I had to). An example of the non-essential stuff is the "enable mouse-pad tapping" setting. If it's not there, I would simply use the laptop's Left mouse button.

Like mikegt4, I don't have a PuppyPin.bak file either. However my internet-surfing abilities within Puppy are undamaged.

Thanks for your advice nic007. Your script for the customised re-master could be very useful if any more Puppy Lucid installations fall over. I had trouble with the built-in Puppy re-master program. I had to save the re-master to an ISO (the re-master program refused to burn a CD) then use Pburn to create the CD.

[nic007]

Hi nic007,
Everything is in my pup_525.sfs file except for about 40 MB of non-essential settings (stuff which is nice to have, but which I could live without if I had to). An example of the non-essential stuff is the "enable mouse-pad tapping" setting. If it's not there, I would simply use the laptop's Left mouse button.

Like mikegt4, I don't have a PuppyPin.bak file either. However my internet-surfing abilities within Puppy are undamaged.

Thanks for your advice nic007. Your script for the customised re-master could be very useful if any more Puppy Lucid installations fall over. I had trouble with the built-in Puppy re-master program. I had to save the re-master to an ISO (the re-master program refused to burn a CD) then use Pburn to create the CD.

Hi, that customized remaster script should save ALL your settings. You can of course do a remaster any time you like and of course also do a remaster of a remaster. Anyways, should you still prefer to use the builtin remaster tool here is another tip for that - during the remaster process, replace the /tmp/root directory created by the remaster program with /root of your running system (copy it). Do the same with /etc but then delete the hidden file .XLOADED. This should save almost all your personal settings. BTW - As far as I know the remaster program gives an option to build the ISO but does not burn it, you need to burn it yourself as you did.

[Latitude]

The built-in re-master program gives an option right at the end of the process, to burn a CD. But if you choose that option it refuses to burn the CD, then you have to start the process all over again. Anyway I got there in the end.

Thanks once again.

[nic007]

Hi nic007,
The built-in re-master program gives an option right at the end of the process, to burn a CD. But if you choose that option it refuses to burn the CD, then you have to start the process all over again. Anyway I got there in the end.

Thanks once again.

Oh, okay. It's been a long time since I've used the built-in script and normally don't do the ISO thing as I don't use a live-CD.

[slavvo67]

This has been an ongoing concern of mine for years. The puppy save file just is not stable so it'll probably happen again. This might be why Barry created that painful snapshot system with his Trusty Tahr. It took a long time at shutdown but at least you had a backup that could reload. I would relate this to the Windows backup system, I guess.

Anyway, I think others suggested as well that once you get your distro the way you want it, you'll want to remaster it so you always have it the way you want it. I suggest you create the .iso file and then burn it later instead of just burning your new remaster to cd / dvd. This way, you can always burn the .iso file again if your cd or dvd gets scratched or something.

One of my solutions has been to keep all added pet packages in a select directory so I know what I added and can reload them when I inevitably lose the save file. There's an edit to Barry's install script (I believe provided by RSH or Mikeb) somewhere in a thread started by me that allows for the install of all the pets in a directory without the manual pop-up "ok" window after each pet. The good thing about the edit is that the packages are still identified under Puppy's Package Manager as installed, so you can always uninstall from there. It makes it easier to recreate and allows me to install them in another version of puppy easily, provided the pets are compatible.

Best,

Slavvo67

[Latitude]

Hi slavvo67,
I keep all the .PET files I use in a backup system so I've got them, even they are no longer available for download. I'm totally OCD about my backups, so I keep them in 15 locations (that's an exaggeration, but only a slight exaggeration).

Barry's re-master script works OK, but it took me a few attempts to work out where to click "yes" and where to click "no" so as to avoid pulling my hair out.

The script offers the user the chance to choose what goes into the re-master's /root and /etc folders, but I didn't have the skills to make that work so in the end I just flew with what the script did and that was OK.

Then I was asked if I wanted to make the re-master specific to the PC I was doing the re-master on and the correct choice is to say "yes" because if you don't you lose too many of your settings.

Right at the end the script asks if you want to burn to a CD or create an ISO and you have to go with the ISO because the script won't burn the CD even if you ask it to. Later you can create the CD from the ISO.

So I got there in the end, but it took me a few goes. If i had it to do over again I'd probably give nic007's re-master script a try.

[mikeb]

Ok from a similar thread I mentioned ext2 save files are too flimsy...constant fsck might help but better to use ext3 or perhaps ext4.
I cannot see if you did use ext2 but thats just a guess....

mike

ps..I believe that tahr thingy saves a copy of the whole system like slitaz does but there is a lot more to save.
save sfs of the tmpfs I find reliable and quick...it may catch on...some are doing it.

mike

[Latitude]

Yes in my ignorance, until about 2 days ago, I was using the ext2 filesystem in my Savefiles. Now I use ext3.

[slavvo67]

I've had issues on both ext2 and ext3. Yep, Barry's backup to the whole system was pretty nice but it still might take less time just to re-install.

Personally, I'm at a point where I do not save anything and re-install every time I boot (though I use a remastered pup with most of my favs).

I just can't trust the save file and gave up on even trying to use it.


I'm the same way when it comes to saving PET packages. And like you, I have some on USB drives, others on portable HDD and others on internal HDD. They're all over the place! LOL

[Latitude]

I wasn't happy with my first re-master attempt so I went back to Square One and did it over again. Following nic007's advice I copied everything from my /etc folder into the /tmp/etc of Barry's re-master program (then deleted the .XLOADED file from /tmp/etc ) and that captured 99.99 percent of my settings. So I'm happy with the re-master now. Once you get used to Barry's re-master program it works fine.