Thank you for the feedback. In current GUI on pressing the restore or backup button it directly catches the previous job done while i think that what should happen is to open a dialog box more in the lines of edit->preferences. If the user want to restore from a particular back up or if he have to do a new back up job he have to go to the edit->preference menu and make changes. This step is very less intuitive and should be changed. I think adding profiles feature would be great. ie something smiler to the 'backup sets' feature in the default file back up utility of Ubuntu (system->Administration->file back up manager). This is what i wish to happen On pressing the backup button --------------------------------------------- User Should be shown the list of back up jobs along with the information about the last time that job was backed up. Also there should be an option of creating a new back up job. On pressing the restore button. --------------------------------------------- I should be shown a list of previously existing back up sets and also an option to point to the location of the back up that the user want to restore. Date of the back up and other information abt the backup that will be restored should be shown along side the name of the back up set. I will send the sketches of these windows shortly. rough Idea about the system restore ----------------------------------------------------- backup can be achieved by a cleverly configured back up job. we might want to get the installed package list from dpkg and the configuration files from etc and home directory of the user. At the time of restoring the packages can be reistalled by a few shell commands and then the configuration files can be replaced to achieve the system restore. If this is a good method of doing it then I will think of a way to include this option in GUI at a good place so that this option is not hidden and at the same not confusing for home users. Since Google Summer of code would be a full time 3 mount project. i think it would be possible for me to achieve these two goals by time. rough About the Idea to use optical disk ---------------------------------------------------------- Since daje dep tars and encrypts the data before it backup. it seems to me that creating a back up temporarily on hard disk is inevitable. But if we do that then we can easily create a brasero project (a simple xml) file and load that in brasero with the -p or -r option. all that will be left for the user to do would be to press the burn button. If the data to be backed is too big to be fit into 1 disk proper division can be done and made into different brsero projects. How usable is this IDEA?? Sorry for the long mail. I would like to have feed back on my ideas. Thank you for taking time to read the mail. <div class="gmail_quote">On 28 March 2010 21:25, Michael Terry <<a href="mailto:michael.terry@canonical.com">michael.terry@canonical.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">I'm not on the mailing list, so please CC: me. Comments below. <div class="im"> On Fri, 2010-03-26 at 14:59 +0530, shahansad kollaparambath wrote: > Deja Dup written in vala has most of the features required for a back > up utility, but has a very unfortunate GUI to go along with it. Also > it lacks the profiles feature. I propose to create a new GUI to Deja > Dup using gtk+ which will be intuitive and support profiles. </div>I'm the author of Deja Dup. Writing a new GUI seems like a big leap. It might be better to incrementally improve any issues with the existing GUI. Do you have particular suggestions? David Bensimon (cc'ed) also had a backup idea for GSoC that also turned into 'improving Deja Dup'. I think the two ideas could probably be collapsed. I talked with David about possible features that would be good for students. I started a page on Deja Dup's wiki to track them: <a href="http://live.gnome.org/DejaDup/GSoC" target="_blank">http://live.gnome.org/DejaDup/GSoC</a> So I'm certainly open to helping mentor students. David also said he would help with some of the mentoring work. -- mterry • Canonical </blockquote></div>