Back up and restore Network Manager configuration?

Question

I'm running the MATE desktop environment and use Network Manager (and its GUI) to manage my network connections. How do I back up its configuration - including all of its remembered WiFi networks - and restore it?

I'm running a fully updated Manjaro Linux installation with kernel 4.14.

Thank you!

Answer 1

Take a look at this which explains that your saved networks are all in

  /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/connectionNames

Take a copy and restore by putting them back there. Network Manager should pick them up when pasted back into that folder.

You may need to go into the individual connections (in the NM applet) and make all passwords public (unencrypted) before doing the backup, otherwise the encrypted ones will be stored in keyring or wallet, and not in the above clear text files.

Answer 2

I was copying the content of the folder

/etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/

to a different computer, but it didn't work: as soon I was trying to make NetworkManager to pick up the connection from the copied setup, NetworkManager asked for the password and created a second file with the same filename and the uuid appended.

So I had:

myConnection
myConnection-78d2dab8-8413-4955-a6f3-7c4530b44e52

NetworkManager is picky about permissions. The configuration files must have 600 permissions (-rw-------) and be owned by root user and group.