Ubuntu – How to read GSettings values from a filesystem backup

dconffile formatgsettingsmigration

I have a complete filesystem backup from an old Ubuntu installation. I'd like to retrieve some data from it that was stored via GSettings, e.g. my old GNOME Terminal color selections or the commands from custom keyboard shortcuts.

This answer says my data is stored in ~/.config/dconf/user, which is some kind of binary database.

How can I read it?

Best Answer

Suggested by a community member in the GNOME IRC channel:

Copy the old ~/.config/dconf/user to /tmp/dconf/user.

Export the data to a human-readable format:

XDG_CONFIG_HOME=/tmp dconf dump / > old-gsettings-data.txt

Optionally edit the data in a text editor and load it into the current database with dconf load.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – the relationship between .gconf, .gnome2, .cache, .local, and other dot-file hierarchies in the home directory

.local, .cache, and .config are part of the FreeDesktop Base Directory Specification. They should not actually be hard-coded but instead use the environment variables (i.e. $XDG_DATA_HOME, $XDG_CACHE_HOME, and $XDG_CONFIG_HOME). There are GLib and Python wrappers for the spec that may be helpful as well. Here's an example in Python:

>>> import xdg.BaseDirectory
>>> print xdg.BaseDirectory.xdg_data_home
/home/andrew/.local/share
>>> print xdg.BaseDirectory.xdg_config_home
/home/andrew/.config
>>> print xdg.BaseDirectory.xdg_cache_home
/home/andrew/.cache

.gnome and .gnome2 are indeed deprecated and should not be used. These were used by libgnome's gnome-config module.

.gconf does indeed contain the settings that gconf-editor accesses as xml files. For instance, compare the output of the following commands:

gconftool -a /desktop/gnome/applications/browser

cat ~/.gconf/desktop/gnome/applications/browser/%gconf.xml

GSettings – How to Read Default Key Value with Dconf

There does not seem to be a nice way to get at the default values directly, but since the client checks XDG_CONFIG_HOME in the environment a decent workaround to get values from a fresh config might be:

XDG_CONFIG_HOME=/nonexistent gsettings get SCHEMA KEY

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – the relationship between .gconf, .gnome2, .cache, .local, and other dot-file hierarchies in the home directory

GSettings – How to Read Default Key Value with Dconf

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