WARNING - Fresh installs when using Evolution email client - a cautionary tale

[David Fletcher]

I'm writing this from my experience of doing upgrades by doing a fresh
install, as I have always done. Now, it looks like I could have very
easily lost all of my contacts information even though I do regular
backups.

Years ago, I used to just do a backup of all the files in /home/
and /etc/, then go ahead and reformat the hard drive with the new
version of the OS, copy all the /home/ files back to where they were,
reinstate the user accounts, and everything would be fine.

Fortunately, I've now taken the precaution of using a different hard
drive to do a fresh install. This became easy since installing a hard
drive caddy system.

If I may digress a moment, when I was responsible for running Subversion
repositories, I knew that to create a nightly backup of the repositories
my script had to first do a hotcopy operation on each repository, then
make a dump file from the copy. This apparently is because a running
database cannot be backed up just by copying its files - the dump file
is the only way to restore a Subversion repository database in the event
of a disaster such as a hard drive failure.

Now, after doing a fresh install of Ubuntu 12.04 on a different hard
drive, running the updates, then installing Evolution, I copied the
~/.evolution directory from the hard drive that's running Maverick,
started up Evolution expecting to see all my messages and settings,
and.... nothing. It didn't work. Just asked to be initialised by hand,
or be provided with a backup file from the File-Backup Evolution Data...
command.

Fortunately, because I still have the working Maverick install on the
other hard drive, I was able to swap back to the other drive, create
this file, then use it to set up Evolution on the 12.04 installation
which is what I'm using now.

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So, let me ask a very important question:- Does Evolution keep all of
its address book and other data in a database that needs to be backed up
by producing what I will call a dump file much like we have to do with
Subversion?
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Today, all I can say about this tale is, I'm breathing a massive sigh of
relief that I used a different hard drive for the fresh install rather
than just plough ahead with a fresh install on the same drive like I
used to do. Otherwise it looks like I'd have lost all of the contacts
information that I've accumulated over many years.

What other applications in the Ubuntu repositories need similar backup
precautions? I heard that Gramps keeps everything in a Berkeley database
just like Subversion does, only unlike Evolution I think it comes right
out and says so, but maybe doesn't warn of the consequences of not
exporting a backup file.

Dave