[Sugar-devel] Journal Backup/Restore UI

[Walter Bender]

On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 6:51 PM, Bernie Innocenti <bernie at codewiz.org> wrote:
> In Paraguay, we started discussing the topic of improving backup and
> restore procedures. Let's compare notes with a wider audience.
>
> We started from an existing backup/restore procedure written by Daniel
> Drake one year ago. It's meant to be invoked from the Terminal and uses
> a transactional approach:
>
> 1) the technician runs a script to restore the journal from the school
> server into a temporary directory while Sugar is still running;
>
> 2) then, you restart Sugar (by killing the sugar-shell process);
>
> 3) on startup, the olpc-session script notices the temporary directory
>    and replaces the datastore with it almost atomically.
>
> The problem with this approach was that it only works as long as there's
> a enough free space in the filesystem, which is rarely the case with
> laptops that are actually in use. Transactional behavior would be good
> to have, but I don't see how we could implement it reliably. Even an
> rsync in-place would have to be done with --delete-before to ensure it
> works all the time.

All you'd need would be one 2-gig SD card per technician if you made
the transaction run from external storage rather than the NAND.

-walter

> This opens the question of how we stop the datastore from accessing the
> journal and mess it up while we're still updating it. We're currently
> doing it quite a gross way: kill the datastore process before beginning
> the restore, then restart Sugar:
>
>  http://trac.paraguayeduca.org/browser/scripts/os-modifications/diario-restaurar
>
> We'll thoroughly test this new kludge tomorrow. I'm confident it will
> work, but it's a shame that users need to call tech support in order to
> restore a backup.
>
> Perhaps it's time to add integrated backup/restore functionality to the
> datastore itself, with a nice UI in the Journal or in the control panel.
> The underlying mechanism could be as simple as the one we're testing
> now, but with proper synchronization with the datastore and no need to
> restart Sugar.
>
> Shall we go on and write a feature page, targeting 0.90? If it's done as
> a control panel item, it may be sufficiently self-contained to backport
> it all the way back to 0.84.
>
> For the time being, I might add the backup and restore scripts to
> olpc-utils. Or, better, create a new sugar-utils package for these
> things that are generally useful on any platform.
>
> Suggestions?
>
> --
>   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
>  \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/
>
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-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org