Re: GNOME Feature Proposal: Backup



Hi Bastien!

> You just lost what applications were installed, and all your Bluetooth
> setup. If you were a web developer, you also lost your Apache, MySQL,
> whatever config files, and possibly your root web directory.

As has been mentioned before it would be enough to list the software
packages installed and repos activated which is trivial with about every
package manager I know of (and might be handled by PackageKit).

For the web designer, I guess he would be inside when not using version
control at some point but even if not he can easily add the
files/directories he wants to backup manually. I guess we can find lots
of special use cases where $HOME is not enough to backup but really
those people needing it can configure it manually (with a nice UI).

> Oh, and you also lost the home directories for whoever share your
> machine and didn't do a complete backup beforehand.

But what if Dave wants to backup to his external disk while Julia wants
to update to her amazon cloud disk? It would of course be nice to have
the option to backup /home/* but I am not sure if it is a good default
option.

> The point being that you should be able to restore something that
> contains all the documents of the local users, and a system installation
> that resembles what you had. The package versioning probably doesn't
> need to be the same, but being able to do backup/restore for upgrades,
> or hardware failure seems like the right thing to do.

Storing only the changed files from the package installation has a
point, but these seem to be very few on a normal desktop system. Ideally
the number should be zero as most things are automatically configured on
modern distros anyway.

> > At last, I don't think the futuristic system wide backup should delay
> > having per-user backup. When this advance system wide backup support
> > exist, we could simply improve the UI and give more options to
> > administrators, and if an admin has setup system wide backup, cleanly
> > inform the non-privileged user that backup is already configured by the
> > system administrator. I would be really surprised such a complex system
> > wide tool gets written and reach a solid state soon, and even there, I
> > would be really surprise if sys-admin would start using such a young
> > implementation right away. Also, restoring user home from a user setting
> > is quite simple, but restoring a full system requires alternative OS,
> > which is usually distro expertise, not a UX expertise (I don't agree
> > Gnome 3 is an OS, but its clearly a UX).
> 
> If we didn't talk to OS components, or implement them, we wouldn't have
> PulseAudio, NetworkManager, bluez, systemd, etc. Thinking that we live
> in the bubble of "user interface" just isn't true.

Still the point of starting with what we have now and improving it over
time seems very valid to me compared to the "we will release is once we
have really all the feature we want"-approach.

Regards,
Johannes

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