On desktop PC I use KDE Plasma 5.27 on openSUSE Leap 15.6.
On the notebook I installed the same system for travelling purposes.
Now for the PIM applications (in my case: KMail, Kontact, Kaddress, Korganizer, KAlarm) I’d like to get on the notebook the same settings as on the desktop PC.
For this I used PIM Data Exporter. It seems, the data export did run well. But at the import there are problems. At every try I get the error message: The data ..../backup_2024_12_23.zip" cannot be opened.
This without more information about the cause.
Are there anyone, who knows that and how to solve it?
There is maybe an alternative mode to export PIM Settings to another system?
I know this is not what you have been asking but I have a similar setup (desktop PC and laptop with exactly the same OS) and I simply rsync my whole home directory from between the two.
I found the best way to do that is to log out of the desktop session (so that none of its programs are running) log in on a Linux virtual console and then run the sync.
I’ve written a simple script which I then execute on the source machine
#!/bin/sh
if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
echo "No target specified."
echo "usage: sync-home-to.sh target"
echo "sync-home-to.sh hephaistos"
exit 1
fi
PARENTDIR=$(dirname "$HOME")
HOMEDIR=$(basename "$HOME")
TARGET="$1":"$PARENTDIR"
echo "Starting sync of $HOME to" "$TARGET"
rsync -av --progress --delete --exclude=*~ --exclude=".cache/" --exclude=".thumbnails/" "$HOME" "$TARGET"
For example when I left home on Saturday I did ./sync-home-to.sh athena
with athena being the name of my laptop in /etc/hosts
When I return I will execute this on athena ./sync-home-to.sh hephaistos
with hephaistos being the name of my desktop PC in athena’s /etc/hosts.
I use a similar method for the “Documents” data , which are saved btw in a separate partition.
As I used sync method for the /home - at least two months ago - I got some issues in KDE Plasma and I find it logical, because not all KDE settings on the desktop can be replied 1:1 on the netbook - different screen size, hardware architecture and drives.
For this reason I wanted to try this time the KDE import/export tool.
I will consider myself lucky then because the approach has worked for me for many years without any issues despite the differences between the two systems.
I guess you could try exclusion rules of the Plasma specific config.
Application config and any data is likely more compatible with both systems.
After many attempts to use pim-data-exporter to “transfer” PIM settings from Desktop PC to notebook, I tried the “old method”: copying /home from one to the other and this time I cannot notice any issue until now (sporadic use at the moment).
The copy method is now quite easy because on installing openSUSE Leap on the notebook I configured /home (and the Documents partition) on a SD card.
About PIM-data-export tool
Does it maybe not run at all?
it cannot open an import zip file of 2,6 GiB (expanded 4 GiB), on a system with 8 GiB RAM and 11 GiB swap
I tried to reduce the import zip file only saving the settings of KAlarm: the toll opened the zip file, but it did not import any!
On the other side the tool version on Leap 15.6 is much older then the last one (for KDE 6.x): 2024-05-13 compared to 2024-12-12.
