Add hourly backup to preferences

Bug #407672 reported by emilio
66
This bug affects 13 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Déjà Dup
Invalid
Wishlist
Unassigned

Bug Description

This is not a bug but a feature request:

-Sometimes I continuously work on some documents and I would like the changes to be backed up more often than once a day. Adding hourly backups to the preferences would solve the problem.

-Also I propose that when automatic backup is enabled, the deja-dup icon should appear permanently on the top panel

Revision history for this message
Michael Terry (mterry) wrote :

You're not the first person to suggest hourly backups. I'll look into it.

I don't agree about the icon permanently on the top panel though. The trend in GNOME is to only show them when necessary.

Changed in deja-dup:
importance: Undecided → Wishlist
status: New → Triaged
Revision history for this message
emilio (emiliomaggio) wrote : Re: [Bug 407672] Re: Add hourly backup to preferences

Regarding the icon you are probably right. However the icon shuold
remain visible after a failed backup to allert the user that something
went wrong. May be you can use a different icon after a failure.

On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 3:04 PM, Michael Terry
<email address hidden> wrote:
> You're not the first person to suggest hourly backups.  I'll look into
> it.
>
> I don't agree about the icon permanently on the top panel though.  The
> trend in GNOME is to only show them when necessary.
>
> ** Changed in: deja-dup
>   Importance: Undecided => Wishlist
>
> ** Changed in: deja-dup
>       Status: New => Triaged
>
> --
> Add hourly backup to preferences
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/407672
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>
> Status in Déjà Dup: Triaged
>
> Bug description:
> This is not a bug but a feature request:
>
> -Sometimes I continuously work on some documents and I would like the changes to be backed up more often than once a day. Adding hourly backups to the preferences would solve the problem.
>
> -Also I propose that when automatic backup is enabled, the deja-dup icon should appear permanently on the top panel
>

Revision history for this message
Michael Terry (mterry) wrote :

Yeah, the failure case before was bad -- just a notification. I think you'll like 11.0's handling, which brings up a Deja Dup window with the failure (as if you had been doing a manual backup) in the background (but with the 'urgency' bit set so it blinks).

Revision history for this message
Roy Lowrance (roy-lowrance) wrote :

I'd like at least the option to pin an icon to the top panel. The main reason is that I depend on Deja Dup for my backups and I need to check that they are being done. In the current release, without the pinned icon, I keep a nautilus window open to the backup volume and periodically check that there are files in it with today's or yesterday's date. This is a lot of clutter for a simple verification.

Some other file system utilities pin to the top panel: Dropbox does and on Mac OS X, TimeMachine has an option to do so.

One might argue that showing the Deja Dup icon is necessary under the assumption that the user depends on the backups and should have a way to provide positive assurance that they are being done. If this logic is sound, then the default should be to show the icon and allow the user to dismiss it.

Revision history for this message
James Gifford (jamesgifford) wrote :

I think it's time to bump this and maybe implement it - since deja-dup is now in the default install for Ubuntu, it should be an option to have hourly backups.

Revision history for this message
Marcos Tobón (markos) wrote :

Yes, I support this idea; I too work on documents very often and I find the daily backup insuficient; just a moment ago I completely lost a work I had done because the Document corrupted and there were no versions of it that contained the changes with no corruption. Please, integrate this feature into the next Déjà-Dup release; this is a great backup tool; it is only missing that one feature (IMHO).

Revision history for this message
typo (gnomeuser8) wrote :

Déjà Dup should be as invisible as possible. Only in case of a failure there should be a message or if the user explicitly wants to look up the status of Déjà Dup.

Revision history for this message
Mike Enoch (mike-enoch) wrote :

I find Déjà-Dup very useful but the inability not to be able to do anything other than daily or weekly backups is very frustrating.

Most other backup programs have facilities to do hourly (or other periodic) backups and this for me would be a great improvement. Please add it as soon as possible!

Revision history for this message
linuxfood (linuxfood) wrote :

Hi - I'm just a rando - but I came across this bug from 3 years ago, and felt inspired. So I implemented it. Happy to make improvements to the code in the branch lp:~linuxfood/deja-dup/flexible-periods in order to get it merged!

Revision history for this message
Naël (nathanael-naeri) wrote :

@linuxfood: Thank you for your work. I'm trying it out right now in the test shell. It looks good to me. I can't review the code very thoroughly though, as I don't know Déjà-Dup's codebase enough.

The periodic-period-length key that you added is in plural form ("days"), which sounds a bit weird to me ("how many days in a period length?", I was wondering). Maybe consider using something more precise, like "1d"/"1h"/"7d" or "24"/"1"/"168" perhaps? Or just the singular form?

Wouldn't the implementation have been easier if you had changed the unit of periodic-period from day to hour, instead of introducing an additional key? (I'm not sure.) So the previous default periodic-period=1 would have become periodic-period=24. Or if you had allowed a decimal value, e.g. periodic-period=0.25 for six hours?

I'm thinking the "Next backup is overdue!" message is going to make non-experienced users anxious. They're going to worry about Déjà-Dup not properly backing up their data. The current "today" tells them a backup is going to be attempted soon.

I found a small bug too: in deja-dup-preferences, when changing the period length to something with a smaller range (e.g. from Days: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 to Weeks: 1 2 3 4), the selected period is not changed to fit the new range, which makes it possible to select a combination you probably didn't mean to allow (e.g. 7 Weeks). See attached picture. The resulting periodic-period and periodic-period-length keys are correctly set (in this case to "7" and "weeks").

Thanks again!

Revision history for this message
Naël (nathanael-naeri) wrote :

@linuxfood: On second thought: supporting hourly backups means many more incremental backups are made, resulting in very long backup chains, which are not recommended by duplicity, if I remember correctly.

This would be a problem. Unless no incremental backup is made if nothing has changed during the past hour? But then there's always some file that changes in some dot-directory, especially if $HOME is in the include-list...

Revision history for this message
Vej (vej) wrote :

Hello.

Very very long backup chains are a don't when using duplicity. So this would need to include a bit of code preventing them. AFAIK there are two ways to do so:

 * Check before an incremental backup if this is the X. backup after the last full backup and perform a full backup if this is true. (X is a fix number like 90, which should be our current theoretical maximum number of backups per chain). I would make X a setting in gsettings.

 * Adjust the gsettings key "full-backup-period", when hourly is set and switch it back when hourly is changed back to anything else.

Best Regards

Vej

Revision history for this message
Vej (vej) wrote :

@linuxfood I had a look at the code diff and it looks good to me. I especially like your comments and the fact, that you renamed methods to fit better with the new functionality. This is good regarding maintainability in the future.

On thing that I did not checked yet, is the translator support. You introduced a few strings, which are hard to translate (e.g. "A backup automatically starts every %%d %s."). Can you please provide translators with an explanation what %%d and %s are replaced with and if the order of %%d and %s has to be kept or can be changed to fit with style rules of that language.

Best Regards

Vej

Revision history for this message
Michael Terry (mterry) wrote :

I made a discussion ticket on GitLab to gather the various suggestions we’ve received around more advanced scheduling options. I’m going to close this in favor of tracking the suggestions there.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/deja-dup/-/issues/111

Changed in deja-dup:
status: Triaged → Invalid
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