In the old days, when I'd go to backup files with Unison or rsync, it was trivial. But I'm noticing problems in KMail, for example, between the mailbox and maildir content and the indexes, I suspect akonadi. With KDE becoming ever reliant on akonadi, how does one properly backup/copy ones KDEPIM apps?

Unless you are using the development release (4.5) Akonadi is not touching your mail. You don't say what problems you are noticing, so it's difficult to guess what sort of help you need. Meanwhile, the direct answer to your question is found at http://userbase.kde.org/KMail/FAQs_Hint ... machine.29

To help you understand Akonadi, try http://userbase.kde.org/Akonadi_and_AddressBook

I have never had a problem simply backing up /home which has,so far, reliably retained all my data.

Great link, annew! I googled it and it wasn't even on the first page

Thank you for the pointers, but when I back up my data at work, and take it home with me, KDE (4.4) is of course running at home to. So there are some conflicts, but if I force everything from the external drive to over-write the local home drive, I still end up with messages that have lost their meta-data/index info. That is, in the message listings, they have no date, or subject.

The only real answer to this, I think, is an IMAP server, so that the data resides in a single place (including metadata) but is accessible from anywhere.

I have one computer at home that is set up to retrieve all my mail, from every account. When I'm away from home my laptops "phone home" and collect my messages, but I'm only reading what is on the server. It's still there when I get home.

Still, one question remains. Why do I need to carry hundreds of megabytes only to keep my contacts in sync between two PCs?

Let us follow http://userbase.kde.org/KMail/FAQs_Hint ... machine.29 as suggested.

Things get really odd from here:

-> Everthing under ~/.local/share/

in my system:

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elias@laptop:~> du -h .local/share | tail -n 1
1,5G    .local/share


You must be kidding, right?

Now, let us take a look at ~/.local/share:

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elias@laptop:~> ls .local/share/
akonadi  applications  local-mail  marble  mime  tracker  Trash


I have assumed that only ~/.local/share/akonadi is necessary and that directory by itself takes 141M. Even so, how reasonable is the design that forces users to carry all this data in order to keep his contacts backed-up or in sync?

But that's not all. The FAQ moves on:
(...)
-> ~/.kde/share/config/nepomukserverrc
-> Everything under ~/.kde/share/apps/nepomuk/ (KAddressBook stores contact groups in Nepomuk.)

Is that reasonable?

With regards to ~/.local/share, I suggest you actually check which directories are using that space... it's probably Marble's cache.

The 141mb of ~/.local/share/akonadi will also cover all calendars, emails, etc in the long term. Note that most of that ( 128mb here ) is InnoDB log files, which exist to protect your data in the event of corruption or crashes.

With regards to ~/.local/share, I suggest you actually check which directories are using that space... it's probably Marble's cache.

No it is tracker's cache.

The 141mb of ~/.local/share/akonadi will also cover all calendars, emails, etc in the long term. Note that most of that ( 128mb here ) is InnoDB log files, which exist to protect your data in the event of corruption or crashes.

I have only 56 contacts! And e-mail is not indexed (as of kdepim4.4.7) by akonadi, right? So, how could contacts+calendar take up to 141M. Are you a developer? If so, I am sure you should find more effective ways of implementing this good idea.

Correct, emails are not stored in Akonadi with 4.4. Contacts "take" 141mb because there is an overhead in initialisating the MySQL database, and keeping recovery logs, to handle the event of a crash.

Most of this cost comes from MySQL itself. SQLite isn't too suitable for Akonadi, especially when it starts to handle Emails, etc as the performance falls significantly.