Re: [Evolution] Backup/Restore

[Patrick O'Callaghan <poc usb ve>]

On Mon, 2020-12-21 at 17:47 -0800, Mr. J wrote:
> Friends: I'm using Evolution 3.36.4-0ubuntu1 on Ubuntu 20.04, and have
> been using it happily for years.  Recently, because of user error,
> I've become more diligent in backing up.  I would like, however, to be
> able to do an incremental backup rather than wait the time necessary
> for the Evolution to back up everything. Is there such an animal
> available within the Evolution program? If not, do any of the other
> programs (i.e. Deja-Dup or Lucky Backup) allow one to back up and
> recover the then up-to-date Evolution data? 

Questions of this sort have come up before. The plain fact is that the
Backup and Restore options are easy to misinterpret (I've suggested
changing the names but we haven't come up with anything suitable so
far). They are not meant as a substitute for your normal backup
procedures. Their focus is on saving your data when you're doing a
major system upgrade or switching to a different system, and even then
they don't back up everything. To quote from the Help:

"The backup saves your settings, mail, contacts, tasks, memos and
calendars. It will be stored in a gzip-compressed tar archive file."

so no mention of address book or filter settings for example. And a
compressed tar file is not something that can be updated incrementally.

Use a real automated backup system, of which there are several good
ones available in Linux. Most of them support incremental backup, so
there's no need to reinvent the wheel for Evo.

poc