[Sugar-devel] Restoring journals on newer versions of Sugar

[Christoph Derndorfer]

On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 4:24 PM, Bernie Innocenti <bernie at sugarlabs.org>wrote:

> Answering your question on IRC:
>

Bernie, thanks so much for the reply, particularly since I hadn't even had
time to send it to the lists:-)


>  <christophd> hi all
>  <christophd> I've got a question related to Journal backup/restore: is
>  it realistically possible to get Journal entries created on 8.2 to
>  11.1.2 with the help of dsd_'s scripts or other ways?
>
> Yes. If you make a tarball from the contents of
> ~/.sugar/default/datastore created on an older Sugar release, then
> unpack it in the same location on a newer release, the datastore will
> automatically upgrade it to the current format.
>

Okay, that's good to know.

Just for the record, the process would be

(1) to tar the Journal on every XO
(2) copy it over to a USB drive
(3) reflash the XOs
(4) untar the Journal backup from the USB drive back
to ~/.sugar/default/datastore

Right?

The main reason why I'm asking is that I seem to remember Martin Langhoff at
some point mentioning that restoring the Journal while Sugar was running
could prove to be an issue. (Unfortunately I can't find the thread in
question at the moment.)


> In fact, the jorunal backup/restore GUI in Dextrose [1] is a distant
> cousin of Daniel Drake's scripts. It also performs backups/restores to
> the schoolserver using rsync, which is what most users do across
> upgrades.
>
> Getting all the little details right wasn't easy, we had to do a lot of
> testing in various scenarios, and there are still a few corner cases
> that we haven't taken care of. For example, if the next version of the
> OS grows bigger, restoring a very large datastore would fail.
>
> The next step would be allowing users to browse remote datastores on the
> schoolserver and restore individual files. This isn't as hard as it may
> sound, because the on-disk format of the schoolserver is just an rsync
> of a regular datastore, and the user has full ssh access to it, so it
> would be easy to access it with FISH [2].
>
> [1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Backup_and_Restore
> [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Files_transferred_over_shell_protocol


Exciting stuff! :-)

Thanks again,
Christoph
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