It looks like tar is having some problems.

I installed Ubuntu 10.04 alpha a few of weeks ago. After that, this alpha version is so terrible that I must switched back to 9.10. So, I backed up all of my profiles data (/home/my_user_name) to my_user_name.tar.gz Here what I did: (in U10.04)

Open Nautilus and goto /home/my_user_name

Press Ctrl+H to view all hidden files.

Press Ctrl+A to select all files

Right click and choose [Compress...]

Now, when I have set up Ubuntu 9.10 again, I extract the tar using Extract Here command from Nautilus. Funny things happened:

1. Instead of extracting to current folder, the archive manager create a folder named my_user_name and put the extracted content into it.
2. All of the files that I placed directly under /home/my_user_name doesn't get extracted
3. All of the directories that started with . (dot) is not extracted.

I wonder if there is any incompatibility between tar in U10.04alpha and U9.10 that cause the problem?

Now every of my email, basket data is long gone. I'm freaking right now.

Is there anything I can do to get the tar return back my data?