Overwrite confirmation needed

[PJO]

I just used Aptik for the first time. I had some problems after doing a clean install of Linux Mint 18 and then restoring my applications and applications settings etc. from a backup (using Mint 17.3) with Aptik.

Am now getting lots of warning messages about my fontconfig file (as mentioned here: https://cixtor.com/blog/fontconfig-warning and in many other places).

The problem appears to be result of my having overwritten a configuration file or of not having a font I used to have or something like that. It would be useful if Aptik offered an overwrite confirmation option for each file to be overwritten.

Unfortunately, I didn't install Timeshift yet (waiting for the new version) so I will have a slightly more trouble resolving than I might have, as well as needing to check what else I might have zapped.

[Tony George (teejee2008)]

Restoring app settings will always overwrite existing files. Since many files are overwritten it is not practical to provide a confirmation prompt. Even if a prompt is provided most users will not be able to decide which files to overwrite and which files to skip. This is why the confirmation prompt is not provided. Since restore is meant to be run on a fresh installation, the home directory usually contains very few configuration files which can be safely overwritten.

The link you provided refers to configuration files in /etc folder. Aptik does not backup or restore files under /etc. Only the per-user configuration files in home will be restored.

[PJO (lexicographer)]

Yes, I appreciate that this (overwriting) is the default and I wouldn't expect it to cause any issues if reinstalling to the same release of the same distribution, say.

I gave up trying to figure out what was different when I restored from Mint 17.3 to 18 but --FYI-- it caused havoc with my fonts, so I have started reinstalling. I suspect it MAY have been something I did after installing 17.3, didn't do on 18, but which was not specific to my own home folder (I discovered later that the problem was reproducible in a clean user account: just type "sudo gksu" in terminal, then exit; the result is a lot of error messages about fonts).

It would be great to be able to save the few additional things that would make a "forklift" migration work perfectly: edits to etc/mdm/Init/Default etc. Don't know if that's reasonable.

Am wondering if etckeeper is the long term solution (not sufficient I suspect) but am using Timeshift now to make rollback easier if I run into any problems this time. Thanks again for both.