As KDE starts getting used by more newbie users, it makes sense to have system restore features built into the core experience itself. Most newbie users currently have to go out of their way to find solutions like kbackup, Pika backup, timeshift, and so on which I feel defeats the purpose of good backup solutions as data integrity should be one of the first things a user should be able to expect from their OS. Here is my proposal for a Backup and Restore section in System Settings.
System Restore - For OSes with supported configurations (including snapshot friendly FSs such as btrfs), expose a System Restore functionality (similar to how Timeshift currently provides) with user configurable maximum snapshot size.
Data Backup - Introduce functionality such as from Pika Backup to allow users to backup data to a local drive/NAS/maybe even cloud providers such as Nextcloud along with setting up a schedule for it.
The combination of these two should make for a very “Time Machine”-esque experience on the Linux desktop which could be a really nice feature to have for everyone, especially new users.
This comes up every now and then, since it makes good sense.
Kup Backup integrates into System Settings and the systray already, some distros do inslude it as a default. It doesn’t do cloud backup currently, and does need remote NAS shares be physically mounted (iirc, no kio type mounting), but I have been using it for years as it does both sync and incremental backups, and multiple plans.
Adding btrfs support would be a nice addition, for sure, but since there are different default layout styles for subvolumes, this might be complicated. Timeshift, for example, is designed around Ubuntu/Mint’s usage, which is different from others.
The atomic/immutable distros iirc have built-in boot options to go to the previous image, and similar things can be set up for snapshots in Grub for “normal” distros and btrfs users, which imo may be a better way to access a rollback if you can’t get to the desktop or tty.
So the parts are mostly all there, it is just needing interest and time from the folks who can do it, I think.
If you install Kup you’ll get a file backup option under Settings, it also supports backing up to networked storage and has the capability to verify the integrity of scheduled backups.
kup already exists and integrates into the system tray as a GUI wrapper for bup… kup just needs a self pruning feature
bup supports pruning and i have a bash script that run every day, altho db corruption (even with verification turned on) eventually causes the whole pile to collapse on a regular basis, so i also use backintime as a back up to my backup for more stable long term storage.
timeshift is what i use for system restore on ext4… it just needs a wrapper to integrate it in to the system tray and help users make a recovery USB for when things go really tits up.
then there is btrfs which is an entirely different beast,and my reading tells me openssuse does a good job with integrating that into the desktop experience (for both? system and data).
then you get to entire disk cloning solutions for transferring or restoring your entire rig with all partitions onto replacement drive.
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its a complex set of variables that is perhaps better left to the distro maintainers but the more hooks KDE can provide for desktop or system tray integration, the more it will be adopted by various distros.
