Re: [Evolution] Restoring Evolution

[Patrick O'Callaghan <poc usb ve>]

On Mon, 2022-08-29 at 16:41 -0700, Mr. J wrote:
> Friends: I have been trying to restore yesterday's Evolution backup
> and get the message: 
>
> File “/home/ij/Downloads/evolution-backup-20220828.tar.gz” is not a
> valid Evolution backup file.  
>
> I created the backup file yesterday with Evolution's backup function,
> and I'm running the restore command from Evolution, but it's a
> restored version from a 2020xxxx.tar.gz file.  (I mistakenly thought
> restoring the data from that 2020 file would simply add to the
> existing Evolution system; instead I replaced all my current data
> with
> that from the 2020 file.)
>
> I'm running Evolution 3.44.1-Oubuntu1 in Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS, on a
> generic Intel Pentium CPU G4400.    When I created yesterday's
> backup,
> I put it in (backed it up to) an external USB hard drive. Thinking
> that might be the problem, I copied and pasted it to the local
> /home/ij....  folder.

Once again I feel I have to bring up the (understandable)
misunderstanding about the Backup/Restore function in Evolution.

I'm afraid this isn't going to help with your current problem, which
others have commented on, but it's important to clarify that the
purpose of Backup/Restore is *not* for doing your daily backups. It can
be used in that way, but I think it's generally a bad idea. As you've
noticed, Backup copies *all* your data, and Restore overwrites *all* of
it. This is not how regular backups should be handled. Aside from being
very inefficient, it's also very dangerous, as you've discovered.

The best way to backup Evolution is as part of your regular home
directory backup procedure. You can do this any way you want, but any
reasonable backup solution will handle incremental backups, work
automatically, keep multiple generations of backups, allow selective
restoring, etc. Evo's built-in facility does none of that. It's just a
compressed tar file, with all that that implies.

I've suggested in the past that we should change the terminology and
call it something else, but so far no-one has come up with a good
alternative name. Any suggestions would be welcome.

To be clear, this is just my own opinion.

poc