I'm running Ubuntu 20.04 but with a customised desktop setup which is using gnome-session, the ubuntu dock and "move clock" extension (intended to fix the excesses of both Canonical and Gnome).
I was quite happily running this on two systems but had to force power off on one because my screen wasn't responsive (screen res mode issues after running an emulator under wine). To my horror this broke many of my customisations, and I was unable to fix them via the Gnome Settings and Tweak Tool.
I had to "rm ~/.config/dconf/user" in order to use Tweak Tool successfully which leads me to suspect that this (binary) file became corrupted.
First Question: is it usual for this file to become corrupted?
I can turn it into a human-readable form by "dconf dump /" it seems.
Second Question: How can I regenerate the binary file "~/.config/dconf/user" from a copy of this dump?
I don't want to manually do all the config if this happens again, and I'm unimpressed that gnome seems to lose its settings.