hubackup

[Mario Vukelic]

On Wed, 2009-01-28 at 14:09 -0600, John Graddy wrote:
> I played with sbackup, and, it works as advertised.  However, as you
> pointed out, "sbackup is more of a *system* backup system than
> a strictly *personal* backup system."  I decided, that if I was going
> to do the backups myself, I would use something a little more straight
> forward (at least, to me).  I settled on using the backup facility in
> Evolution for email and a simple copy of the home directory for
> everything else.  That saved me from having to go through a lot of
> restoring of things in Evolution to save the email, which I have had
> to do in the past if I saved only the home directory.

I understand, thanks. When setting up backup solutions for myself and
the computer of friend, which I administer, I found nothing that
perfectly fit my needs, either. I ended up scripting a personal solution
for myself with rdiff-backup, and setting up sbackup for my friend.

sbackup works, but I had to make some compromises. Namely, backing up
big media files with sbackup is problematic since it seems to insist on
gzipping the backup files. Doing this for a few hundred GB makes a lot
of noise in the living room. It's possible to leave out the media in
this case because it is already backed up elsewhere.

Also, opening the *.tar.gz files from the sbackup user interface (which
uses Ubuntu's Archive Manager) is slow and can make Archive Manager look
like it hangs.

Otherwise, however, sbackup works pretty well and if you don't share my
media problem it might just work for you. It can do exactly what you now
do manually, i.e., backing up the home directory, which *does* include
all evolution mail and evolution's settings. Only that, once set up, it
will do so automatically every day (or week, or whatever you want)

I do not understand why you lost evolution settings before when "only"
backing up the home folder. I did it many, many times without problems.
All evolution mail and settings are stored in the home directory. Of
course in this case you have to restore all of /home/<user> (including
hidden directories), not pick individual folders when backing up or
restoring.  

(That, or you need to know what you are doing :)
IF you don't backup/restore the whole home directory of the user, AND IF
you don't use evolution's built-in backup facility, then you need to
back up and restore more than /home/<user>/.evolution, where evolution
stores email and *some* of the settings. Other settings are
in /home/<user>/.gconf/apps/evolution/
and /home/<user>/.gnome2_private/Evolution. Here is a link to an older
writeup that details what to do. It comes from a time when evolution did
not have its own backup facility yet, so might be out of date, but
that's unlikely:
http://ubuntu.wordpress.com/2005/12/03/how-to-backup-evolution/
Remember, if you back up and restore the whole home directory of the
user, you don't need any of that.)