113

There should be provision to backup and restore KDE system settings.

Following settings can be backed up and restored -

- Appearance
- Desktop
- Notifications
- Windows behaviour
- About Me
- Default Applications
- Regional & Language
- Keyboard & Mouse
- KDE Wallet
- Session Manager
- Login Manager

etc.

If there is possibility of incremental "rolling backup" which can have option to slide back to settings of week ago / month ago / quarter ago / year ago it would be excellent!

This could be really awesome if it integrates with some online cloud service.

I beleive there is already a rolling backup program specifically for KDE (read about it at planetKDE); I don't think it would be too much to add the backing up of settings to that aswell.

I'm putting a very solid +1 on this because we already have the software - and it's those sorts of essentials that seems to be an almost obvious addition to at least the KDE core apps - and better still the control panel.

If there is possibility of incremental "rolling backup" which can get me to settings of week ago or month ago or quarter ago it would be excellent!

Considering the expected amount of space required for each backup (i don't think it needs more than.. 10 megs) i doubt this point is really important.

Regards

I think he means rolling backup in the sense of can be pushed to any point in time. For this, assuming it's to be done daily, it would still make sense to use an incremental backup. Imagine a week taking up 70MB.

Maybe we could have it track what you've done to your system settings over time and create an algorithm that adds its guess of your next change in the rolling backup. Don't think anyone's ever developed a fowardup before.

Oh dear no.

Please no.

What? Daily saving for settings? I think this is meaningless. It makes sense to make such amount of backups for data, sure, but.. for settings???

Having a set of backups having different configs stored is enough imho, so 100 MB would be the space required for this at most. With this space requirements the incremental backup is not really needed at all.

Regards

Mamonetti wrote:What? Daily saving for settings? I think this is meaningless. It makes sense to make such amount of backups for data, sure, but.. for settings???

Having a set of backups having different configs stored is enough imho, so 100 MB would be the space required for this at most. With this space requirements the incremental backup is not really needed at all.

Regards

No it's not daily. I have mentioned weekly or monthly in my message above.

I am more interested in "rolling back to older backups" than incremental backup. And my intention was that backup should not overwrite previous backup so that I can roll back to a backup which is few backups older.

So If I do some changes in settings and I find few issues after the backup is taken and I don't remember what all changes I made, I may be in uncomfortable situation.

(Right now I am facing this issue. I am not able to get back to my original qtcurve style settings)

Of course I'm not trying to tell anybody how to deal with this, but a common use case would be having a few intermediate test configs, and also 4 or 5 "stable" configs, which is the goal in the end. You can also have a changelog-like system related to each one, but that's all.

In the end you should use a time-based naming schema for each file, so introducing extra code for controlling this is useless. Once you want to load a config you can choose it by name (the name should include date/time information, such as "config test .... 2010/01/01 00:00:00 ... v3", or whatever you prefer) or by the changelog, but in the end it's your choice, no more, no less.

Regards

Absolutely correct.

Why not just make profiles? If you're not going to use your systems from the other day, then don't save it. If you are, then save the whole thing as a profile.

Being able to save system settings would be very very useful for me. Each time I have a new KDE install I have to spend ages reconfiguring everything as I like it.

This utility needs to work on different distros and be compatible accross different versions of KDE 4, so that I can backup my settings on mandriva using 4.2 and then import them into a fresh install of kubuntu using 4.4.

Also necessary is to include configuration for Kate/kwrite and kontact (including signatures and possibly locally stored messages?) in the backup process.

Rolling backups would be ideal, so that you could choose which date you want to restore from, but this is not necessary. The critical needs would be met by simply being able to make a one off backup to a file (an archive or folder) and then to be able to import that again. Everything else can be added later.

Centralising the settings backup procedure for different KDE apps would be a great move, but significantly more complicated no doubt. For instance, Amarok has no satisfactory backup procedure in my view and if addressing the backup needs of the desktop and some apps like kontact, then why not include amarok backups also?

Just some ideas.

I think we're overcomplicating things. I think the ability to just save configs or portions of configs should be enough.