Comment 17 for bug 876146

I've talked with several people over the past couple of days about different ways of restoring a system after a failed upgrade. These include:

* Using Déjà Dup to back up files before upgrading. Difficulties: (1) Déjà Dup currently targets your home folder, not system files; (2) a full incremental backup system is overload for this fairly specific task; (3) no-one has time to do the work.

* Inviting people to back up their system files to an external disk or USB key. Difficulties: (1) it's not technically obvious how the restore function would work; (2) no-one has time to do the work.

* Using the existing friendly-recovery software. Difficulties: (1) It's console-based, so it has a hard friendliness limit; (2) it couldn't be graphical, because if it was, it would be using your disk too much to be able to fix errors on it; (3) no-one has time to do further work on it this cycle.

* Installing a recovery image on a separate partition during installation. Many Ubuntu OEM installations already do this <https://launchpad.net/ubuntu-recovery>, but to help users of vanilla Ubuntu, the setup would need to be integrated into Ubiquity. Difficulties: (1) while it would help people installing from scratch, it wouldn't help upgraders, because during an upgrade, the ext4 partition you're using right now can't easily be resized to make room for the separate partition; (2) no-one has time to do the work.

* Installing a recovery image as a file on the same partition as the installation. Grub can happily boot from ISO files inside partitions. Difficulties: (1) it wouldn't help if the partition gets hosed; (2) no-one has time to do the work.

Now, when I say "no-one has time to do the work", I'm referring to the people I've talked to about it. If anyone has a good idea about how they can implement any of these options, I'd be happy to sketch out a design for them to work on. Until then, though, I'm going to postpone design work on this in favor of things that I know people plan to implement.