[Sugar-devel] Backup / Restore Activities: some impressions

[Christoph Derndorfer]

Hi Sascha,

I had previously mentioned looking at the combination of your Backup (v5)
and Restore (v4) Activities in order to facilitate the upgrades of the XOs
at the Austrian pilot project. While time constraints unfortunately kept me
from going ahead with the OS upgrades of all the children's XOs I did spend
quite a lot of time experimenting with the two Activities and using them to
pull Journal backups of the XOs for usage analysis, doing upgrades between
builds 767 and 883, etc.

In general the only real problem I ran into was on a machine whose name
contained a "ß" which resulted in a slightly confusing error message
telling me that the backup couldn't be created.

One other issue which I found is that the Restore Activity seems to copy
over the Journal backup from external media such as a USB drive to the
internal flash memory before actually going ahead with the restore. This
led to situations where I wasn't able to restore a 205MB backup on a
machine which had 350MB of free disk space (after installing build 883)
because I would have needed at least 410MB of free space.

One possible enhancement that I can think of is adding a list of the
installed Activities into a separate text file within the backup (which I
now did manually). Aside from being useful for analysis purposes (which
Activities did the users install independently vs. what the teacher had
recommended, etc.) it would also help speed up the restore process by
documenting which Activities the users had previously installed (and will
likely need to be able to run the prior Journal entries).

Otherwise the Activities seemed to work really well in the scenarios I
tested such as going from builds 767 to 883 and carrying over several
hundred Journal entries.

Thanks for the great work! :-)

Cheers,
Christoph

-- 
Christoph Derndorfer

volunteer, OLPC (Austria) [www.olpc.at]
editor, OLPC News [www.olpcnews.com]
contributor, TechnikBasteln [www.technikbasteln.net]

e-mail: christoph at derndorfer.eu
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