I would like to find out how I can backup a KDE setup. I recently had a crash on one machine and it would be nice if I could have restored the GUI configuration and save the trouble of setting it up again. My operating system is FreeBSD 9.2-RELEASE.

I tried backing up and restoring ~/.kde and ~/.local but the effect of that was simply to reset the configuration - exactly the opposite of what I wanted. I have an open thread on the FreeBSD forum, but there's not too much use of KDE there, so I thought I'd try here as well. Thank you for your consideration.
~ Ole

Hm, no, restoring .kde should work. On some systems the directory is called .kde4 though. All KDE-related settings are stored in that directory.

Please note that when restoring either ~/.kde4/ or ~/.local you should not be logged into KDE - the restore should be done in a virtual terminal.
You may also want to include ~/.config in those backups.

Thanks for answering scummos. I've still not been successful after a number of tries on a test account. Since you say that it should work, I will assume that I'm doing something wrong and look closer at it. I realized that doing it as root was giving the wrong permissions and fixed that.

@bcooksley: I could have made that mistake. I have just been moving over to another terminal and doing "cp -Rf .kde4 .kde4-bak" and then the reverse. Since you guys seem to think it should work. I'll persevere and come back with confirmation soon.

I have it working now. Thanks guys for confirming that it should work.

Although the backup and restore works correctly, I do get a few error messages in the terminal upon backup. However, I think those are artifacts of this version of FreeBSD and my particular installation.

To confirm what is needed so that someone finding this thread can do it too:
- Make a directory like /home/user/.kde4-bak
- Go to /home/user/.kde4 and type "cp -R * /home/user/.kde4-bak
To restore:
- Go to /home/user/.kde4-bak and type "cp -R /home/user/.kde4
Except for making the backup directory, you need to be logged out of KDE, but logged in as a regular user - not root.

You can also use cp -p to preserve file ownership, then you could also do it as root. Not that I would recommend doing so.

Can you mark the thread as solved?