Re: GNOME Feature Proposal: Backup

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Wed, 2011-05-11 at 10:03 +0200, Dave Neary wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Michael Terry wrote:
> > My plans have always been aimed at personal data only, with any
> > support for whole-system backup as a nice bonus.  There are technical
> > issues there like "if you hit a file the user doesn't have read
> > support for, are you going to prompt for the root password every
> > time?"
> 
> FWIW, this is exactly the use-case I'm missing. I would like to copy my
> personal data to an external hard drive, remote server or cloud storage
> service, so that if my hard drive goes boom, I can get my settings,
> documents, photos, etc back after installing a new distribution on a new
> system. I'm not that bothered about a full system recovery for a GNOME
> back-up tool.
> 
> So I applaud your focus :)

That's because you're lead to believe that it's enough :)

We have the concept of user roles in PolicyKit. If the person is marked
as the "administrator", they can change the backup settings, and they're
the ones whose credentials should be used during backup.

Say my hard drive died. How do I get back to a working desktop with my
documents from my distribution's live CD? If the process is tedious, or
complicated, then it's no use.

FWIW, Time Machine uses a disk image on a remote AFP share. The machine
which you'll be backing up is the one with rights to update that image
(so the backup system works as a privileged user). Access to the files
is restricted through Unix permissions on the disk image which match
one-to-one the permissions on the local disk.

Thus, you can have multi-user systems where the whole system is backed
up even if it's not the person who set up the backup that's logged in.

I'd like to note one particular tidbit about backups. Backing up is
easy, it's the restore that's hard. And I'm sure I'm not the only person
that's worked in tech support that ended up shaking their heads when the
person on the other end of the line was doing backups but never tested
restoring (or didn't know how to).