Re: [Evolution] location of data files

[Paul Smith <paul mad-scientist us>]

On Fri, 2008-07-18 at 13:21 -0500, HggdH wrote:
> Er, couldn't we do it based on the current backup option?

Absolutely, although I've never tried it myself so I don't know how well
it works.  I just did a backup and it seems to me like it contains all
the necessary files.  I didn't try the recovery at all.

The only trick is, to be fully useful, we need to be able to invoke it
without Evolution running, probably from the command line, and point it
to a different directory to consider the the $HOME directory, so people
can run it "offline" (maybe from a restore from backup of their home
directory, or a copy of their home directory they put onto a USB key or
from another, failed disk they're mounting to recover what they can,
etc.)

Also, whatever operations it invokes needs to be backward-compatible:
that is, it can't just assume it's backing up _this_ version of Evo.  It
has to work to create backup tarballs of much older versions of Evo (and
it needs to document what the oldest version it will work with is, and
ideally even check for it in the command and print an error if it's too
old).

If that's available/possible, then great!  Why are we still recommending
such a scary-looking sequence of commands in the FAQ?