Re: [Evolution] Restoring Evolution

[Pete Biggs <pete biggs org uk>]

On Tue, 2022-08-30 at 11:51 -0500, c. marlow wrote:
> > > On Tue, 2022-08-30 at 11:49 +0100, Pete Biggs wrote:
>
> > > > I would possibly go as far as to say that that particular
> > > > functionality
> > > > has run its course and could be consigned to the big bit-bucket
> > > > in
> > > > the
> > > > sky.  
>
> SEVERELY DISAGREE... I'd go back to Claws if the backup / restore
> feature was removed from Evo.

What about if there was an external program - say something called
'evolution-backup' - that you could run to do a backup. Is it
absolutely necessary to have it as a menu item?

> Even though I fully use IMAP now with Fastmail, I still use the
> Backup / Restore feature to restore the years of emails I have stored
> under " Saved on this computer" I think is what it says..  Also,  the
> backup and restore feature, restores not only my email but my account
> information too, to where when the restore is done, all I have to do
> is input my passwords and boom! I am back up and running in like 10
> sec.

There's nothing magical about the Evolution backup. It is just a gzip
tar file of .local/share/evolution (for the mail files) and
.config/evolution (for the configuration). In the past, when the config
was stored in dconf, it was a bit more complicated since the dconf keys
needed to be dumped and then backed up. But now everything is stored in
.config/evolution.  That's also why a much better way of dealing with
backups is to use standard backup procedures with versioning and so on
- then just restore the two directories from the nightly backups like
anything else you need to recover. 


P.