I have made a copy, moved icons around on the desktop, and then logged out, logged in, and restored what I had copied. The icons again stacked in the upper right corner of the desktop. After this exercise, I display below the ls -la of both the original and saved files. Clearly, these files seem to contain the correct information, but somehow it does not seem to restore quite correctly. For now, I am keeping a screenshot of the current desktop layout so that at least I may manually restore things in the future. An "automatic" restore would be nice. Notice in the gvfs-metadata directory there are "automatically" backed-up copies of home with various extensions with past dates. What would be useful is a utility that did the manual save and the permitted a proper manual restore (a straight restore via a copy seems to not keep things in the correct location -- perhaps a Software Updater recommended update of some entity changed the way the "coordinates" are measured/described?
ykarant@equality-HP-ZBook-15-G2:~$ ls -la ~/.local/share/gvfs-metadata/*home*
-rw------- 1 ykarant ykarant 374404 Mar 1 13:03 /home/ykarant/.local/share/gvfs-metadata/home
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ykarant ykarant 32768 Mar 1 13:03 /home/ykarant/.local/share/gvfs-metadata/home-2c92a3a1.log
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ykarant ykarant 32768 Mar 1 12:38 /home/ykarant/.local/share/gvfs-metadata/home-6add20ad.log
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ykarant ykarant 32768 Mar 1 12:41 /home/ykarant/.local/share/gvfs-metadata/home-c1a40386.log
-rw------- 1 ykarant ykarant 360588 Feb 18 10:17 /home/ykarant/.local/share/gvfs-metadata/home.UPGVY0
-rwxr-xr-x 1 ykarant ykarant 4140 Oct 9 22:13 /home/ykarant/.local/share/gvfs-metadata/home.X0RKS0
ykarant@equality-HP-ZBook-15-G2:~$ ls -la ~/saves-gvfs/gvfs-metadata/*home*
-rw------- 1 ykarant ykarant 374404 Mar 1 08:07 /home/ykarant/saves-gvfs/gvfs-metadata/home
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ykarant ykarant 32768 Mar 1 08:07 /home/ykarant/saves-gvfs/gvfs-metadata/home-8f4c6a45.log
-rw------- 1 ykarant ykarant 215060 Nov 14 19:09 /home/ykarant/saves-gvfs/gvfs-metadata/home.T57FU0
-rw------- 1 ykarant ykarant 360588 Feb 18 10:17 /home/ykarant/saves-gvfs/gvfs-metadata/home.UPGVY0
-rwxr-xr-x 1 ykarant ykarant 4140 Oct 9 22:13 /home/ykarant/saves-gvfs/gvfs-metadata/home.X0RKS0