And, of course, I knew this already. In my regular backup scripts I do it right: 'rsync -avz ~ srvr:/home' not 'rsync -avz ~/* srvr:/home/bob/' But I wanted to backup all the files that are usually excluded (tmp, cache, music and video) so I thought I'd do it manually. Fortunately, there's an older backup that has everything. I'm only going to restore hidden things like .gnupg and .ssh and not worry about all the desktop settings. #