[Owncloud] Owncloud for backup

Fri Jan 17 11:00:32 UTC 2014

On 15.01.2014 00:10, Jose David Bravo A wrote:

Hey,

> I started the developing of the backup solution I mentioned to you.
This is very cool, thanks for starting it :-)

Sorry for the delay of the answer. In general I can say that I think 
that a backup solution would be very beneficial to many of the ownCloud 
users. We would highly appreciate if you join our development efforts 
within the community.

>
> For now I have it in: http://github.com/jdbravo/mirall-backup and I already made:
>
> 1. In the wizard you can choose the folders you want to backup, just clicking in the folder checkbox. You don't need to enter aliases or target paths. ( screenshot: http://66.128.54.89/owncloud/public.php?service=files&t=5ffebb5243ce8c8d4c97f8b578956709 )
> 2. I created a class called StructureChecker, and it will create the structure for each folder you selected. Ie, if you choose the folder /home/user1/folderToBackup, it will go to owncloud and will create /backups, /backups/home, /backups/home/user1 and /backups/home/user1/folderToBackup. We need to do this before add the folders to the FolderMan (screenshot: http://66.128.54.89/owncloud/public.php?service=files&t=d9e967caf6f877e67b05b53665cd1174 )
> 3. In the Account Settings you can add more folders, delete, etc. But you don't need to deal with aliases or targets because it's for backups (if you want to backup your data you don't care in what directory or with what alias you want to store it) (screenshot: http://66.128.54.89/owncloud/public.php?service=files&t=75682c11b459d9f6cd10ba5d471a41c1 )
> 4. Finally you can go to the Restore Widget and it will show you the folders/dirs inside "/backup" (constant string in account.h), every time you click on a folder it will run a spinner and load the childrens files/folders. (screenshot: http://66.128.54.89/owncloud/public.php?service=files&t=299187fff20efa9952a9a302206a060d )

This is great progress already!

But what is the best integration of the two usecases in the application? 
I am a bit concerned that users will not understand the difference 
backup and sync if we put it into the same app. But since mixing that 
can be fatal, we have to make that difference very clear.

For this reason, I am wondering if we shouldn't have a second little 
program, just as the ownCloud Sync Client, but the ownCloud Backup 
solution. That way we can distinguish the two different functionalities 
better and people wouldn't that easy be confused. Moreover, both apps 
would have a more specific GUI.

This would be the great start of the "ownCloud Desktop Suite" :-) What 
do you think about that?

What would that mean technically? You probably already saw that mirall 
provides the library owncloudsync.so. It contains most of the 
functionality that is needed for syncing such as the csync wrapping, 
credential and config management and such. The backup app should utilize 
it and add its own GUI classes. The lib works for mirall and the Plasma 
desktop client already, but if we need to adjust stuff for your needs, 
we're flexible.

> But now begins the hard work, the restore process.
>
> I want to display the files versions, I can't do that with webdav, right? how can I get those then?
Good question. I am not sure if there is an api already but we can find 
out. I will try to pull somebody in who knows ;-)

> Any ideas of how can I restore a full backup? using again csync? or just download the files using the webdav with a QNetwork...?
Well, if you use csync, the app does not need to download files that 
might be still there in the correct version again. So I think I would go 
csync, or rather the layer that we added above. We can talk the details, 
I think it's quite straightforward.

> I haven't tried it in Win/Mac, just in linux but I think it should work fine.
Haha, these are false friends ;-) And it is a hard requirement here to 
check that it works. Building for Windows can be done on Linux easily 
(well, kind of ;-) , but Mac has to be done native. We can help of 
course if you don't have a Mac.

Talking about collaboration: If you need help, the desktop team is there 
for you, as all others in the ownCloud community, for example Jan who 
will jump in and help with UX and graphics. If you want to commit into 
the mirall repo, which I would love to see because it avoids forks, you 
would have to sign a copyright agreement [1]. For questions on that, 
please contact Frank <frank at owncloud.com>.

> What do you think? Owncloud is great and we don't need to do many things to fork it for backups, Mozzy, CrashPlan are grooving very fast and we can do something similar with owncloud and opensource.
Yes, I think that will be cool and we can have a lot of fun together :-)

regards,

Klaas

[1] 
http://owncloud.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/owncloud-copyright-assignment-common.pdf