Re: Design: Backup Schedule

[Dylan McCall <dylanmccall gmail com>]

On Sun, Apr 15, 2012 at 5:13 PM, Michael Terry <mike mterry name> wrote:
> Does anyone have any thoughts on whether to allow setting the backup schedule?
>
> Currently Deja Dup allows the user to specify a number of days between
> backups (UI shows settings like "daily", "weekly", "monthly").
>
> I'm wondering if we shouldn't just drop the preference altogether and
> always use "daily" backups.
>
> My reasons being: why would a (target audience) user particularly care
> how often the backup happens?  They just want their data to be backed
> up.  This would be one less preference and would let us make more
> optimizations in future, like instantaneous backups or some such.
>
> If this happened, I might want to make each backup less "noisy" then
> (less notifications about successful, normal operation backups).
>
> -mt

So, in my case I do my backups to an external hard drive that is
usually turned off (because it doesn't have anything immediately
useful on it, except backups). Deja Dup pops up once a week asking me
to please connect my backup hard drive so it can run a backup.

If that was happening daily, it would be rather annoying, but I do
agree with your point that daily backups would be reasonably fast and,
if it's done well, much less obtrusive. (Not to mention the lowered
chance of data loss!).

I think my ideal arrangement would be if Deja Dup does a quiet daily
backup, with a simple notification that it's happening, but only when
it's possible — when connected to the Internet, with the backup media
attached. Then, there could be a louder backup (like it does today) at
a wider interval like every two weeks. That louder backup would ask
for the backup media to be attached and it would communicate a little
more actively that it's doing stuff.

The louder backups would have a slightly better chance of actually
happening. With the quieter backups, the user might log out before the
backup can finish. Something along those lines would also give you
somewhere to present the occasional full backups that happen: the
daily backups can be reserved for quick, incremental updates while the
loud backups can get away with heavier maintenance tasks.

Dylan