GSoC 2010 Idea: Replacement for outdated "Keep" (KDE Backup Tool)

[Dominic Lyons]

Hi everyone!

Besides some other interesting ideas I saw on the list I'd like to make
another suggestion: Since years Kubuntu has no essential, easy to use backup
tool pre-installed. On KDE 3 I used (and in fact still use) Keep. But this
tool isn't developed any further and has some glitches, for example
auto-backups don't work (only for me?).

It was my idea to make some sort of follower of Keep basing on KDE 4/Qt 4.
The aim should be a backup system that is
   - reliable(!)
   - easy to use (especially for new users that just wont to backup their
data without the need of background information about thing like increments,
diffs and so on)
   - decent (as long as everything works fine the user won't be disturbed,
only unintrusive notifications will indicate the start and stop of the
automatic process)

So for the beginning it will be a quite a simple backup tool but I guess it
will fit the needs of a majority of average users. As backend I would use
rdiff-backup (as Keep did, too) because it allows space efficient
incremental backups and usually is very fast after the initial backup. Also
it is known to work very well and it preserves filesystem-specific
attributes.

I would like to know if there is any interest in such an application, then I
would write a complete application. As I have seen this was asked for GSoC
2006 already and as far as I know nothing has changed till then... Also this
time a backup tool is a suggested Idea (but I guess it is meant for Gnome),
so if someone is doing that job we could maybe share a common backend.

So now it is your decision :-)
I'm waiting for further questions, suggestions and your opinion.
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