Sorry for taking so long to reply but had to go out of town.
I think I have everything working now. I guess my main problem besides the empty space between my ears was that when using e17 desktop when I used the menu "system/reboot or system/shutdown I did not get the usual choice to backup or not. Now that I see if I go to the menu "applications/system/exit" I see the familiar exit with the choice of backup or not. So now that I have the system setup and backed up to the mydata.tgz file when I boot up I have my settings and when I exit I choose not to backup and everything is kept the way I like.
I decided to not back up my .mozilla directory to save my bookmark file due to the ownership changing and just save my bookmark file places.sqlite to my home folder. It takes a couple extra steps but I launch firefox, copy my bookmark file to my firefox default folder and restart firefox and I have the bookmarks working. After I shut down firefox, if I added more bookmarks, I save the file to my home folder and backup, otherwise no need to backup.
I will test adding export BACKUP=0 to /home/tc/.profile to see if that works for me when I get back to my computer but that will not be for a week.
Thank you all for your help and for making this system possible.
Eric Meddletn