Hi sblass92
From what I can see, your /home and /opt are persistent, they are on sda1. It must take a long time to shutdown
and boot with 500Mb in your backup. Remove home from your .filetool.lst and run a backup. Restart your machine.
As far as I can tell, your /home should be intact when your machine comes up.
I hope you can appreciate my confusion
Here are the steps I took earlier, which resulted in .filetool.lst restoring itself to a version that listed home and opt:
1. modify /mnt/sda1/tce/boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf so the only code I've added is 'home=sda1' 'opt=sda1'
2. modify /opt/.filetool.lst to remove 'home' and 'opt' from the files to backup
3. perform a backup using the command: filetool.sh -b
4. sudo poweroff
Upon reboot, my changes to .filetool.lst have been reverted to include home and opt, changes to .profile have been overridden.
I tried this this time, using the same bootcodes (home=sda1 and opt=sda1):
1. modify /opt/.filetool.lst to remove 'home', but leave 'opt'
2. perform a backup using the command: filetool.sh -b
3. sudo poweroff
When it boots up, .filetool.lst remains as I left it and .profile is persistent with my changes.
I suppose this solves my problem, but I still don't totally understand why this was happening.
.profile was getting restored from backup on boot, but all my directories and files were not. Nothing in .xfiletool.lst explicitly ignores this file.
.filetool.lst was getting restored if left blank, but not if I specified opt to be restored.
Thank you to everyone who assisted