I Lost My Sports Car!

I just spent nearly 2 hours at https://www.devuan.org/os/keyring.

EVERY. SINGLE. THING. THAT. COULD. GO. WRONG.

The Daedelus keyring ALWAYS downloaded for me as a 0 bytes file.

Following the instructions on that page, I got yelled at for Bad paths, unexpected end of file, and about 10 other things.

I must have tried those instructions, over and over, from start-to-finish AT LEAST 35 TIMES.

I gotta get some sleep.  ;(

My father was a Senior CE (customer engineer) for IBM back in the old days. He used to have to wear a WHITE (not light blue!) shirt, and a tie, to go from client to client, and CRAWL through their mainframe computers, to physically remove actual BUGS, replace burned-out vacuum tubes, replace tape drives, etc. I remember the first time that he showed me a big metal box, sitting in the trunk of his car. At the time, he told me that it was IBM's newest mainframe computer. No crawling around inside that thing. LOL!

Just in case anyone wonders why I seem a little "slow," I was a college professor, teaching several computer applications courses to 200 students every semester, plus instructors, administrators and other educators, at regional, state and national conferences, for several years.

Then, I had two strokes -- the first one in my early 50s.

Now, I can ask questions, sometimes slowly figure things out, and occasionally even remember what I had for lunch. 

Now you know why I'm so grateful that people here are so patient, helpful, and friendly to me!

Yes, I did! Thank you for asking! I can't remember what I did to fix it, but I remember that I was surprised at how simple it turned out to be, like deleting the extra splash screen from the boot parameters, and then rebooting.

I'm here almost every day, trying to keep up with important stuff. I almost always quietly lurk in the spaces between the lines!

My best to everyone. You guys (gals) are great. That's why I'm still here.

Who is this message written to? And what is this message answering?

^^^^^^
Same here.

Thanks, chris2be8 and rayburn,

I already knew those tips, but then again, you two didn't know that I already knew them and even understood why they make sense.   

So your tips were very right-on and very appreciated.

And, to be perfectly honest, it's probably only a matter of time before I won't know those things any more, so reminders are a good thing for me.   

Thanks, again!

Cool! Thank you!

I just got as far as your rsync command itself, and I felt my eyes glaze over! 

But it looks like it could be a good possibility for my future.

Because my brain is still too exhausted to actually read and understand your rsync command, could you tell a couple of things?

Would your rsync script backup my / only, or would it also backup my separate /home (with all of my newly-restored data in it)?

Did you include a "restore" script in your post? Again, my brain cells are currently still too full to even try to look. 

Once you somehow restore your backup to your local (or network) computer, what do you have to do to get it to boot, other than just use rsync to copy all of the system files into place? That's the part that still ABSOLUTELY TERRIFIES me. I've always felt very safe when my system is backed up, but I've recently learned (from my long and bitter experience) that a backup does me no good unless I can RESTORE it so that it will work.   

AGAIN, THANK YOU!   

Yes, I searched for "linux" and "refracta." That's why I kept finding stuff about Refracta Linux. I may be stupid, but I'm not dumb. 

In the past 2 days, I've spent 24 harrowing hours on this issue. Yes, you read that correctly. Twelve hours a day for two days.

NOW, I'm finally up and running again.

No matter what I tried, NOTHING would see my separate data partition.

This morning, I finally restored a 3-month-old backup of all of my data to a completely different place inside my home folder, which is mounted separately.

I think my problem is that I used to know a lot more about this stuff.

I used to be able to do a fresh install, and then -- with a couple of commands -- see all of my data.

Not so any more. It's been several years since I had to do it (I've done dist-upgrades for many years). I just don't remember the magic that I used to use to see my data.

None of this is anyone's problem but my own.

As for Refracta Snapshot and Refracta Installer, once I was able to find and APT install the installer, BOTH worked really quickly and easily.

Until that LAST step of the installer, when I thought it was going to congratulate me on restoring my snapshot, but instead, it gave me a lecture about BIOS and GPT and boot, and partitions. Other people probably know what to do. I didn't.

So I spent several hours, trying to get past the bootup black screen with the grub prompt.

Using my wife's PC, I found an excellent how-to by Carla Shroeder. Step-by-step instructions. Easy to understand.

I followed every step. EVERY STEP. Still got the grub prompt.

At the end of Carla's article, it says something like, "If you STILL can't get it to work, you'll need to use something like Super Grub2."

So, I downloaded Super Grub 2. It saved as an image (picture) file. When I tried to open it, my wife's computer spit up, trying to open it with LibreOffice Draw or GIMP or something.

So, I re-downloaded it. But when I tried to boot from it, the end of the boot process suddenly stopped and said something about waiting for the internet. Multiple boots, same problem.

That was how EVERYTHING went for me, for 2 DAYS. Run as fast as you can, and then suddenly slam into a wall. Sheesh.

Long story short, a fresh install, plus restoring 3-month-old backups, and many hours of painstaking configuration, finally got my system back to exactly where it was 3 days ago.

Don't ever have two strokes, if you can help it. 

Thanks if you tried to help me, or if you bothered to read this entire rant.