drwho, 1 year ago

Your chances are pretty good if you copy them back - ultimately, that’s what the restoration function of backup software does.

As for ownership of the directories and files, that’s a bit trickier and might involve some trial and error. root:root is a safe bet for most of it, but there is a lot of stuff in /var that is owned by system accounts.

What distro are you running? That’ll help figure it out.