How and where does dconf/GSettings store configuration data?

Question

Yesterday I tried updating from MATE 1.4 to MATE 1.6. I didn't like some things about it, and I decided to switch back, at least for now. One of the changes was a switch from the mateconf configuration system to GNOME 3's GSettings. As I understand this is a frontend to a system called dconf (or connected some other way).

This rendered many of my settings viod. I figured I could try to migrate them, but unlike gconf and mateconf, which created convenient folders in my home directory and filled them with XML I could edit or copy, I wasn't able to find any trace of dconf's settings storage.

A new Control Center is provided (and mandatory to install) but I don't want to be clicking through dozens of dialogs just to restore settings I already have. The Configuration Editor utility might be okay, but it only works with mateconf.

So what I want to know is where I can find the files created by dconf and how I can modify them directly, without relying on special tools.

Answer 1

I almost forgot that I asked this, until abo-abo commented on it. I now see that this is a SuperUser question, but for some reason I can't flag it. I would if I was able to.

The best solution I found was to install dconf-tools, which is like the old conf-editors.

As for the actual location of the data on disk, it seems to be stored in /var/etc/dconf as Gzipped text files, but I'm not entirely sure because I'm not using Mate 1.6 right now. I wouldn't advise editing them directly.

I've been having another issue with dconf, and I checked the folder that I mentioned above. It doesn't even exist. There now seems to be a single configuration file at ~/.config/dconf/[USERNAME]. It isn't in text format, so special tools are required to edit it.

This might be the result to an update to dconf.

Answer 2

I had a similar problem (was trying to back up keyboard custom shortcuts). The path for that was:

dconf dump /org/gnome/desktop/wm/keybindings/ > wm-keybindings.dconf.bak
dconf dump /org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/media-keys/ > media-keys-keybindings.dconf.bak

This thanks to redionb's answer on Reddit.