There’s no Red Hat anymore, it was sold to IBM 5 years ago. All their recent shifts in FOSS strategy are a predictable result of that. IBM only cares to streamline RHEL operations not about what’s usable or appropriate for Linux in general.
If even file owner is not preserved (it is not always root, espetially in /var), you likely lost files’ extanded attributes an, maybe, also permissions. Without them your system won’t work normally.
Then, contents of these directories must be consistent with other ones. E. g. /var contains a package manager data about packages you installed. If you installed/removed anything after creating a backup, information about this will be lost.
If you created the backup while system was working, some files (espetially under /var, again) could be changed during that process, and this also makes such backup unusable. Every sysadmin knows that to create a database backup by copying files, dbms must be stopped.
In future, think about restoration before planning a backup and test if this possible immediately after it is done.
I don’t think so, but you should be able to create an install usb, same as for linux, boot into that, and access recovery tools. From there, you can definitely run chkdsk, done it before though I don’t recall every step.
For those who don’t know, shift+F10 to bring up a command prompt when using a windows install image. Can do it when it starts asking you for stuff. I know the chkdsk tools and manage-bde (the bitlocker cli) are avaliable there at least.
That can be done, but as others mentioned, if you don’t have permissions/other attributes for the files it’s going to be a real PITA to get everything working. If I had to do that I’d just copy over the files, chown everything to root and then use package manager to reinstall everything, but even that will most likely need manual fixes and figuring out what to change and to what value will take quite a bit of time and complexity of it depends heavily on what you had running on the host, specially things under /var.
The main difference between Ubuntu and Fedora is the package manager. Most of the rest is just selected default values for configuration and cosmetics, and what helper scripts are or aren’t present on the system. They’re both mainstream distributions aimed at the general user, and they’re shaped by their goals.
To see how different distributions can be, you need to compare the mainstream distributions to stuff that’s decidedly not mainstream, like Gentoo, Alpine, and Nix.
Just as a trivia note: Gentoo does package a couple of other distros’ package managers (app-arch/rpm and app-arch/dpkg), for use in installing otherwise-unavailable commercial binaries, although I suspect app-arch/rpm2targz sees more use than either of them.
NixOS, Alpine and Gentoo are also pretty popular, but yeah, Fedora and Ubuntu it is the distros the regular person is associating linux with. Or doesnt know what is linux at all :)
Because the seemingly great choice of Webbrowsers in reality boils down to a risky monoculture of chromium (/its webengine). The only real alternative is Firefox/Blink. Risky, because the main driver behind Chrome-/ium (Google) is not acting on behalf of the public interest towards a free, open and privacy preserving internet. Instead they’re working on a privacy exploiting one that gets locked down using DRM technologies. Them being a vendor of major parts of the internet as well as the browser to use it makes this a lethal combination. Firefox will definitely exist for as long as Google exists, because its their tool to defy claims of a monopoly, but they will do everything to keep it the small and mostly irrelevant “competitor” it is currently. Therefore, stand against Googles evil play and help Mozilla to gain some actual indipendence and leverage for keeping the internet free (as in freedom), open and privacy preserving.
Is anything keeping you from just reinstalling the system and mounting your home into it again (maybe the majority of your customisations live in /home too)? I feel that is a lot less of a hassle than copying files around.
In principle you should be able to restore your system by just copying all of the relevant files from the backup to their correct partitions - it can’t really get any worse if it doesn’t work.
For the future: A backup is only any good if you know how to restore it and tested that that actually works.
Regarding the permissions: If you do a cp fileA.txt fileB.txtfileB.txt will normally be owned by the creating user. So a sudo cp … will create the files as root.
I would personally use rsync with a few additional options, archive among them. This way the fs is restored exactly as it was. But that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense if the files weren’t copied that way too.
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