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There are, to my knowledge, a lot of users who once in a while would like to do a clean reinstall of the OS (Kubuntu in my case) and every time you plan on doing such a thing, you always have to remember to back up the things you'd like to keep. Mostly these are personal files and such, but there are also settings you'd like to keep from your previous install.

The situation for saving settings right now are very time consuming, as for every application you'd want to save settings for, you'd have to look up the directory where it saves its settings. If you're lucky, some applications have the ability to export settings from the GUI, but you still need to go through a process of exporting or copying folders through different applications.

Besides being unintuitive for an avarage user, the current backup situation in KDE is also very unflexible. As a normal user, there are some settings I'd like to keep, but there are also settings I don't want to keep or which are unimportant (I for instance don't really care what kind of wallpaper my desktop has). This causes a problem when there are both settings I'd like to keep and settings I don't like to keep within the same software. If I, for instance, would like to save rss-feeds I subscribe to in Akregator, but not the archived posts, I'd have to know where Akregator saves those seperately and copy in accordance to my wish (note that this is an illustrative example as I'm not really sure how Akregator saves those things, but you probably get my point).

A third problem lies in the user not remembering to backup everything it wants to keep. I'm sure a lot of users recognize the situation where you've spent hours backing up, reinstalling, and restoring your saved settings just to find out that you've forgot to backup something and will have to reset it from scratch to get what you want. Although this is not a problem with the system itself, it could probably be minimized with a cleverly designed user interface, working as a kind of memoryhelper.

All these shortcomings would be possible to (or at least simplify) with a global backup-system, possibly as a module in system settings, for backing up settings. Although I'm not a programmer myself, I belive this would be technically possible since most of these settings are saved in pretty much the same place within the system and all apps are aware of exactly where these are saved (obviously).

I see great use for this kind of backup-software. No one wants to spend hours just trying remember which settings to backup, find where those settings are housed, and copy them manually. The restore-function could also possibly be integrated in the install software in every release so that every time you do a complete reinstall, you should get an option to restore your backed-up settings on first boot.

As I mentioned, this is just an idea that I thought of. Anyone who got some suggestions on how this could be improved in any way, feel free to comment.