Re: Module Proposal for 3.0: Déjà Dup Backup Tool
On Sat, 2010-02-13 at 17:10 -0500, Michael Terry wrote: I'm not sure if this is too early, but it's been 6 months since modules proposals opened for 2.30, so I'm guessing it's an appropriate time for 3.0 modules? I think GNOME could use a backup program. There are some out there already, but having a GNOME-blessed one would focus development effort. = What's my proposal? = First, I'm specifically proposing my own pet project Déjà Dup (DD) for inclusion in the Desktop release set. DD is only one of many backup programs out there. I think it's pretty sweet but would also like to open the floor for comparisons to or inclusion of other programs. Maybe mine isn't the best fit and overtures to other maintainers would be appropriate. Déjà Dup's story is that it only tries to be a data backup program for disaster recovery. But aims to be the best little disaster recovery program there is. It's main website is https://launchpad.net/deja-dup, and there is a mission statement for more details of why it exists (http://live.gnome.org/DejaDup/Mission). It is designed to do the right thing without getting in the user's way. It encourages backing up to a cloud service. It encourages backing up on an automatic schedule. It is designed to target the not-very-computer-literate. It prefers to backup too much rather than too little. It integrates well into GNOME. It's also basically a glorified frontend for the command-line backup program duplicity. Next, I will talk a little bit about where I see backups fitting into GNOME and whether it needs such a program at all. == User Trust == If the user doesn't trust their backup system, what's the point? A backup system is only as strong as its restore, but by the time you find out that your system fails the restore test, it's usually too late. Backups are tricky. We're responsible for user's data and they will be very mad if we lose it. Maybe GNOME doesn't want to get into that business, though one can always point to the boilerplate disclaimer of fitness for any particular task. :) Déjà Dup is a wrapper around the already-proven command line tool duplicity. (Although, Duplicity is a program under active development. So it's not necessarily a rock-solid hasn't-needed-fixes-for-years tool.) DD has a suite of automated GUI tests. So I trust it (and use it). But these facts aren't user visible. I suspect user trust is a matter of time and usage. Unfortunately, Déjà Dup hasn't been around very long (about a year and a half now). == Why Not Just Live in the Cloud? == More and more of our lives are being stored remotely in Internet services and clouds (flickr, facebook, Ubuntu One, rhapsody). This seems to reduce the need for a backup of your data, if it all lives in the cloud. However, I don't think backup can ever be quite replaced. Unless a cloud system is specifically designed to hold your data, encrypted, with snapshots, with promises of availability, no-data-loss, and integrated into your desktop, there is still a strong use case for your own backup. * Most cloud services only keep track of your current files. If you delete a file and later realize you need it a month ago, you're out of luck. * Cloud services tend to be fragmented (different services for different data). You don't have easy access to all your data from one place. * There will likely be data that you don't trust the cloud to hold. * You often only put a 'weaker' version of the data in the cloud, but keep the pristine version locally (e.g. photo upload to flickr). * You may have large amounts of data that aren't appropriate for upload. Of course, there's no reason you can't store your backup files in the cloud. I look forward to the sci-fi future where everyone uses thin clients into server farms that offer transparent data safety and duplication. I won't stand in that future's way for love of my own code. But in the meantime, I think a backup program is a useful offering. == What Does Backing Up Give Me? == There are already different solutions for the basic thrust of what backups do (data protection). * Rollback to previous versions of files with btrfs or some version of my-filesystem-is-a-vcs * Sync local files to the cloud (like Ubuntu One) But none of those are able to meet all disaster recovery needs (of three main sorts): * Revert to old version of file. * Recover a small number of lost (accidentally deleted) files. * Total system failure. What many backup systems (and Déjà Dup specifically) provide are: * Rollback to previous versions * Automatic backups (i.e. no-intervention after initial setup -- if you have to do it manually, you're not doing it enough) * Incremental backups (space saving) * Encryption (so you can backup to non-trusted locations) * Ease of off-site backup (for really bad disasters like
Re: Module Proposal for 3.0: Déjà Dup Backup Tool
Hi, it's the maintainer of Deja Dup again. A couple things: 1) I've been talking to the usability guys a bit about the UI in general and thoughts on a possible Profiles interface. There's an ongoing discussion on the mailing list (though I think I haven't been terribly responsive in the thread) and a wiki page: http://live.gnome.org/DejaDup/UIReview 2) I'm still curious to get feedback on other maintainers' experience with pulling in other regular developers once they became a GNOME module. Frankly, I'm leery of the extra burden it would put on me in terms of bug reports and expectations-of-service. Though since the initial proposal, DD has been put in Fedora 13 by default and become a featured app in Ubuntu. I suppose I'm already on the hook pretty hard, and what's one more avenue of exposure. Here's the original question from my proposal, where I also brought up the question of the Progress on a regular basis requirement: However, I suspect that inclusion into GNOME would (by virtue of a massive amount of new users) create lots more bug activity and patch submissions. This would create much more work for me (or at least a sense of obligation to do more work). Frankly, I'm content with my current DD workload and don't want to increase it. So I would probably scale back my feature work as more maintainer work cropped up. How OK is GNOME with modules that don't add many/any features ever release? I know there is a Progress on a regular basis requirement, but I'm not sure how that's scaled for developer team size. Ideally I'd get a co-maintainer or some frequent developers? I'd even be happier if someone else wanted to maintain it and I would just be a developer on the project. I'm curious about other maintainers' experiences about how GNOME-inclusion leads to more developers or maintainers. ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Module Proposal for 3.0: Déjà Dup Backup Tool
Il giorno gio, 06/05/2010 alle 13.24 -0400, Michael Terry ha scritto: Hi, it's the maintainer of Deja Dup again. A couple things: 1) I've been talking to the usability guys a bit about the UI in general and thoughts on a possible Profiles interface. There's an ongoing discussion on the mailing list (though I think I haven't been terribly responsive in the thread) and a wiki page: http://live.gnome.org/DejaDup/UIReview A really cool UI I've used for (simple) backups on extral drives is the one from western digital. http://www.wdc.com/en/products/wdsmartware/ The fill bar is really useful, helping you to visualize your backups ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Module Proposal for 3.0: Déjà Dup Backup Tool
On Thu, May 6, 2010 at 10:24 AM, Michael Terry m...@mterry.name wrote: 2) I'm still curious to get feedback on other maintainers' experience with pulling in other regular developers once they became a GNOME module. Frankly, I'm leery of the extra burden it would put on me in terms of bug reports and expectations-of-service. Though since the initial proposal, DD has been put in Fedora 13 by default and become a featured app in Ubuntu. I suppose I'm already on the hook pretty hard, and what's one more avenue of exposure. Then you're already screwed. ;-) Being part of GNOME doesn't mean much (in terms of user adoption) unless the distros also decide to include you. If you're already being included in Fedora and Ubuntu, then you're already going to have the problem of more users and more bug reports. At that point, being an official GNOME module actually becomes helpful. You get the GNOME bug squad helping you triage your bugs, you get gnome-love n00bs looking for ways to help and finding your project, and you get awesome translation and documentation teams contributing to your app. You may or may not get consistent code contributions...but again, since you're already in the position of being included in popular distros, you're already screwed, and being part of GNOME only makes contributions and early testing easier for everyone. ;-) Hope this answers your question, Sandy ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Module Proposal for 3.0: Déjà Dup Backup Tool
On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 2:56 PM, Michael Terry m...@mterry.name wrote: In the interests of JFDI, I added deja-dup and its external dependency duplicity to jhbuild's 2.30 moduleset for ease of testing. Déjà Dup will also shortly land in Fedora rawhide, thanks to Rahul Sundaram! Indeed, it has landed now, and while we are considering whether to include it in the desktop spin or not, Jon and I went over the UI and interactions a bit, and came away with the following ideas for improvement. Don't be scared by this long list, it is mostly UI details... - Could have a better first-time screen than just two big buttons. Maybe just ask the user what he wants to backup if no locations have been configured yet... The entire question of initial setup and assisting the user with setting up a reasonable backup configuration is an interesting one that seems to be left out so far. - With a UI consisting just of two big buttons, the main window should not be resizable, since huge buttons look odd. In the same vein, the assistant windows should probably not be resizable. - The main window should not pop in and out as the two assistants are shown. - The button labels should probably have ellipses to indicate that there is a dialog coming up. Otherwise, people might be scared to click the Restore button, thinking that it might directly start a possibly destructive action. - When the restore is actually happening, it should warn me about overwriting files. It should also tell me what locations will be restored, before starting it, and ideally allow me to selectively restore. - The nautilus extension should only offer to restore files that are actually present in the backup - When restoring a single file (in nautilus), the success message at the end should not talk about 'files' - ngettext... - It would be good if the nautilus extension also allowed to add a location to the set of backup locations. - Identifying backups by date is ok, but it would be nice to make that a little less detailed. If there is only one backup from March 10, it would suffice to identify it as 'Today' or 'March 10', not the full 'Wed 10 Mar 2010 03:26:55 PM EST - If the 'Include from:' list in the Backup assistant is long enough to break over several lines, the window has size issues, the 'Except for:' line gets cut off. In the same dialog, an empty 'Except for:' line should probably just be hidden. - The Details expander in the progress page needs to enlarge the window to a reasonable size. It is somewhat tricky to get that right, but I have code to do it somewhere... Hope this helps, Matthias ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Module Proposal for 3.0: Déjà Dup Backup Tool
Comments below. On 10 March 2010 15:49, Matthias Clasen matthias.cla...@gmail.com wrote: Jon and I went over the UI and interactions a bit, and came away with the following ideas for improvement. Don't be scared by this long list, it is mostly UI details... ::snip:: Hope this helps, Yes, it does, thanks! One of the things I wanted to eventually take advantage of is the GNOME usability team, but these are all valid usability issues. I haven't replied to each one because largely I agree and the particular details of why things are the way they are now aren't important. -mt ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Module Proposal for 3.0: Déjà Dup Backup Tool
In the interests of JFDI, I added deja-dup and its external dependency duplicity to jhbuild's 2.30 moduleset for ease of testing. Déjà Dup will also shortly land in Fedora rawhide, thanks to Rahul Sundaram! -mt ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Re: Module Proposal for 3.0: Déjà Dup Backup Tool
Hi, Am Samstag, den 13.02.2010, 17:10 -0500 schrieb Michael Terry: I'm not sure if this is too early, but it's been 6 months since modules proposals opened for 2.30, so I'm guessing it's an appropriate time for 3.0 modules? GNOME 2.31 Module proposal period has started this week. :-) First, I'm specifically proposing my own pet project Déjà Dup (DD) I've added it to http://live.gnome.org/TwoPointThirtyone/Desktop . andre -- mailto:ak...@gmx.net | failed http://www.iomc.de/ | http://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper ___ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Module Proposal for 3.0: Déjà Dup Backup Tool
I'm not sure if this is too early, but it's been 6 months since modules proposals opened for 2.30, so I'm guessing it's an appropriate time for 3.0 modules? I think GNOME could use a backup program. There are some out there already, but having a GNOME-blessed one would focus development effort. = What's my proposal? = First, I'm specifically proposing my own pet project Déjà Dup (DD) for inclusion in the Desktop release set. DD is only one of many backup programs out there. I think it's pretty sweet but would also like to open the floor for comparisons to or inclusion of other programs. Maybe mine isn't the best fit and overtures to other maintainers would be appropriate. Déjà Dup's story is that it only tries to be a data backup program for disaster recovery. But aims to be the best little disaster recovery program there is. It's main website is https://launchpad.net/deja-dup, and there is a mission statement for more details of why it exists (http://live.gnome.org/DejaDup/Mission). It is designed to do the right thing without getting in the user's way. It encourages backing up to a cloud service. It encourages backing up on an automatic schedule. It is designed to target the not-very-computer-literate. It prefers to backup too much rather than too little. It integrates well into GNOME. It's also basically a glorified frontend for the command-line backup program duplicity. Next, I will talk a little bit about where I see backups fitting into GNOME and whether it needs such a program at all. == User Trust == If the user doesn't trust their backup system, what's the point? A backup system is only as strong as its restore, but by the time you find out that your system fails the restore test, it's usually too late. Backups are tricky. We're responsible for user's data and they will be very mad if we lose it. Maybe GNOME doesn't want to get into that business, though one can always point to the boilerplate disclaimer of fitness for any particular task. :) Déjà Dup is a wrapper around the already-proven command line tool duplicity. (Although, Duplicity is a program under active development. So it's not necessarily a rock-solid hasn't-needed-fixes-for-years tool.) DD has a suite of automated GUI tests. So I trust it (and use it). But these facts aren't user visible. I suspect user trust is a matter of time and usage. Unfortunately, Déjà Dup hasn't been around very long (about a year and a half now). == Why Not Just Live in the Cloud? == More and more of our lives are being stored remotely in Internet services and clouds (flickr, facebook, Ubuntu One, rhapsody). This seems to reduce the need for a backup of your data, if it all lives in the cloud. However, I don't think backup can ever be quite replaced. Unless a cloud system is specifically designed to hold your data, encrypted, with snapshots, with promises of availability, no-data-loss, and integrated into your desktop, there is still a strong use case for your own backup. * Most cloud services only keep track of your current files. If you delete a file and later realize you need it a month ago, you're out of luck. * Cloud services tend to be fragmented (different services for different data). You don't have easy access to all your data from one place. * There will likely be data that you don't trust the cloud to hold. * You often only put a 'weaker' version of the data in the cloud, but keep the pristine version locally (e.g. photo upload to flickr). * You may have large amounts of data that aren't appropriate for upload. Of course, there's no reason you can't store your backup files in the cloud. I look forward to the sci-fi future where everyone uses thin clients into server farms that offer transparent data safety and duplication. I won't stand in that future's way for love of my own code. But in the meantime, I think a backup program is a useful offering. == What Does Backing Up Give Me? == There are already different solutions for the basic thrust of what backups do (data protection). * Rollback to previous versions of files with btrfs or some version of my-filesystem-is-a-vcs * Sync local files to the cloud (like Ubuntu One) But none of those are able to meet all disaster recovery needs (of three main sorts): * Revert to old version of file. * Recover a small number of lost (accidentally deleted) files. * Total system failure. What many backup systems (and Déjà Dup specifically) provide are: * Rollback to previous versions * Automatic backups (i.e. no-intervention after initial setup -- if you have to do it manually, you're not doing it enough) * Incremental backups (space saving) * Encryption (so you can backup to non-trusted locations) * Ease of off-site backup (for really bad disasters like floods, fires, or mass theft) = Déjà Dup Details = OK, hopefully I've convinced ya'll that a backup program is a useful offering. Here's more information about my
