Automatic backup app settings?

[rustleg]

(a wishlist request - KNOS10 I guess)

When you do anything in KNOS if you're working locally in KNOS home then you're going to have some changes to data. So as this system is intended to be run from DVD (although at present I'm running from a hard drive) would it be a good idea to have the option to set up an automatic backup of app settings on shutdown/reboot. It's easy to forget to do this and then you've lost your work.

I'd envisage this going to the spare space above the system if it's being run from a stick or hard drive which has such a partition. Otherwise it would have to prompt for a location. Also to be date/time stamped so you don't overwrite the previous one. It would then be a matter of manually regularly cleaning out old copies to release storage space or you could just set a parameter which automatically cleans out all but the last n copies.

If the last one which was saved automatically was bad you could delete it and leave the last good one. This also needs another icon in the shutdown panel: restart without automatic backup.

[Kevin McAleavey]

That's a difficult one to do given the way Gnome and the system does its shutdown. When you go for shutdown, Gnome provides space for "shutdown scripts" but they haven't worked properly for several versions now. When shutdown starts, the kernel takes over and no longer communicates with the desktop. As a result, power could go off in the middle of a write with no way to stop it. Therefore, when we designed the backup feature, we didn't even try to make it automatic as there's no way to control what happens once shutdown is initiated.

The only alternative provided was a 60 minute countdown before passing the stick to the kernel but even there, that countdown no longer would wait if something hadn't completed doing whatever it was doing. And so our reasoning was to make it completely up to the user to remember to do as there was no other assured way to do it given their design.