Posted by astromme

Edit: After speaking with Nuno and Mofux I’ve made some modifications to the System Settings page. This is how it looks now:

TimeVault is alive! Ok, so maybe it was never really dead. But I’ve found some time to work it and after reworking most of the internals I’ve finally gotten it to back up again.

For those who don’t know, TimeVault was originally a gnome backup system that I used way back when I was on Ubuntu. I liked the concept but disliked the implementation and so sometime after moving to KDE I started working on my own TimeVault. The goal is to have a user friendly, dead simple backup system that runs in the background, knows about (and exclusively uses) external media and isn’t afraid to integrate into KDE frameworks wherever it can.

Now the project has deviated quite a bit from the Gnome one with the same name. With that in mind, I’m contemplating a possible name change to reduce confusion. If people have suggestions feel free to leave a comment or send me an email.

The following is an image of the KDE System Settings page for TimeVault. It shows the current state and allows the user to select the backup drive and the folders that should be backed up.

Some new things of interest are:

TimeVault no longer relies on a daemon running as root

New KAuth integration (a part of KDE SC 4.4) which allows the system settings module to have it’s authorization bit

Allows the user to select which paths are to be backed up

Provides the user with notifications regarding the backup status (KNotification)

Runs the backup with a KAuth helper running as root, much more secure than before

Some things that I still need to work on:

The KIO slave has been neglected and no longer works. This is high on my todo list

A dedicated restore framework is not yet in place. If the KIO slave isn’t good enough this will be needed

The plasmoid also was neglected. I would like for it to contain backup statistics as well as information on the currently running file. Possibly also adding files/folders to the backup by dragging and dropping them on the plasmoid.

If you have ideas for me feel free to post them in the comments. I know I can’t think of everything that’s useful to a wide swath of people.