Re: [Evolution] Newbie-questions

[Milan Crha <mcrha redhat com>]

On Mon, 2016-10-24 at 10:17 -0700, Zan Lynx wrote:
> Because _nobody does that_. None of the distro personal backup tools
> do it. Absolutely none of the system-level backup tools do it. What,
> would it log into each user account, open Evolution and use File:
> Backup/Restore? Nope.

        Hi,
I do not think it's "nobody does that", really.

The logging in as a user is good to preserver file/directory attributes
in the backup file. Otherwise you can run it with properly modified XDG
variables and you'll get there (modulo file/directory
attributes/permissions).

As the evolution itself should be off when doing the backup, the menu
runs an external tool, which is called with some arguments:
   /usr/libexec/evolution/evolution-backup
Actual path can differ, depending on the distribution.

> If Evolution hasn't yet, just sit down and document all of the file
> locations and DConf / GSettings keys.
>
> I'm fairly sure that's already been done but I haven't looked at the
> docs lately.

Yes, you are right.
https://help.gnome.org/users/evolution/stable/data-storage.html.en

> And as I recall Evolution's Backup/Restore isn't even useful as an
> upgrade strategy since no one guarantees a newer version can load an
> older backup file.

This is not accurate. Evolution itself, but also evolution-data-server
services, has a migration facility from older versions to newer (doing
the opposite (aka migrate for downgrade) is nearly impossible,
definitely in the general case). It's true that there had been done a
cut in the migration, I do not recall precisely, I think one cannot
update in pre-3.0 versions, but otherwise the code is not removed. That
way you can for example update/restore backups which still use GConf,
and it was removed several versions back.

The thing is that the backup/restore works like system updates. It
backups/restores the user's home directory content to the state in that
particular version, thus if anything goes wrong, one is still able to
go back. There is not much difference between restoring from a backup
and updating the system for the evolution.

In any case, nobody said that there is not a better tool for
backup/restore. This is one offered directly in the evolution, hoping
to be useful. If you do not find it useful, then that's okay. Users
have always an option, which is good.
        Bye,
        Milan