I have recently upgraded to KDE 4.2 (Kubuntu Intrepid) and must admit that I am impressed by the progress that KDE 4.x is making. Congratulations to all developers!

With that upgrade, Akonadi was introduced to unify KDE PIM resource access, which to me seems a sensible thing to do. As far as I can tell, the only thing that is currently managed by Akonadi is my address book, but in future releases, all of KDE PIM will be using Akonadi as a unified resourse management system, using both files in the user directory and MySQL storage.

This leads me to the question what will be the best way to backup user data. Currently, and what for me personally seems to be a big advantage of using Linux over other OSs, all user data is stored in the user directory, such that simply copying the home directory of a user allows me to back up all user-centric data and settings. Presumably, files managed by Akonadi will remain in that directory, but what about resources that will use MySQL (like e-mails, if I understand correctly)? Are there simple ways to back up that data as well, or to replicate it on other machines? What about removing a bunch of old e-mails from the database and keeping them on a separate physical backup storage (which can currently be done by simply moving the files)? Will such a thing still be possible once the e-mails are managed by Akonadi?

Thanks for any help,
Jan

I believe you will be able to use the applications that handle the data to export it to archive the information. In terms of backups, the Akonadi Tray application is capable of doing this.

jdrugo wrote:With that upgrade, Akonadi was introduced to unify KDE PIM resource access, which to me seems a sensible thing to do. As far as I can tell, the only thing that is currently managed by Akonadi is my address book...

Most likely not even that. We have deactivated client side migration in KDE 4.2, Akonadi is only access in the same data in parallel.
This was activated in the RC1 though.

jdrugo wrote:This leads me to the question what will be the best way to backup user data. Currently, and what for me personally seems to be a big advantage of using Linux over other OSs, all user data is stored in the user directory, such that simply copying the home directory of a user allows me to back up all user-centric data and settings. Presumably, files managed by Akonadi will remain in that directory, but what about resources that will use MySQL (like e-mails, if I understand correctly)?

Data will always be stored in usual locations such as files or groupware/email servers.
The database is a cache, so the only possibilty of it containing data which is not present elsewhere is when the respective backend could not be written to yet, e.g. server not reachable.

However, since Akonadi allows to operate on PIM data independent of its actual storage location, my guess is that we will actually see backup solutions built on top of it, e.g. regularily backup data which has been marked "important" and stuff like that.

Cheers,
_

bcooksley wrote:I believe you will be able to use the applications that handle the data to export it to archive the information. In terms of backups, the Akonadi Tray application is capable of doing this.

Thanks! I just discovered the Akonadi Tray application a few hours ago. It seems to do the job, but unfortunately creates a single file, which makes incremental updates impossible - something that would certainly be useful for e-mails. Let's see which options KMail will offer to this respect.

Cheers,
Jan

anda_skoa wrote:Data will always be stored in usual locations such as files or groupware/email servers.
The database is a cache, so the only possibilty of it containing data which is not present elsewhere is when the respective backend could not be written to yet, e.g. server not reachable.

However, since Akonadi allows to operate on PIM data independent of its actual storage location, my guess is that we will actually see backup solutions built on top of it, e.g. regularily backup data which has been marked "important" and stuff like that.

I hope that doesn't mean that all PIM data is cached, which would be quite wasteful, given my few Gb's of e-mails. In any case, thanks for the explanation!

Cheers,
Jan

jdrugo wrote:I hope that doesn't mean that all PIM data is cached, which would be quite wasteful, given my few Gb's of e-mails. In any case, thanks for the explanation!

It won't.
Caching is adaptable on "collection level", basically for each folder of PIM data (where e.g. an address book file would be one "folder").

The idea is that you can selectively decide for example which IMAP folder you want to always have access to and which folders you rather just have on the server.

However, there is currently no GUI for that yet, though resources can already set appropriate "Cache Policies".

Cheers,
_