Re: Backup Akonadi data

On Thursday, 2010-10-07, David Goodenough wrote:
> If I want to move from one machine to another, but keep all my address
> book info etc (and in future all my emails), is there a backup/restore
> facility in Akonadi?  If not I would suggest that one is needed - is there
> any documentation as to what gets stored where so that one could be
> written?

Since Akonadi has several components, lets start with the center of it all.

The Akonadi server configuration is a couple of files in $HOME/.config/akonadi 
[1].
It contains which data sources and helper programs are active and will be 
started and watched (so they can be restarted on crashes) by one of Akonadi's 
server processes (akonadi_control).

Each data source handler (called resources) or helper program (called agents) 
can have its own configuration.
The general rule [2] is that for every entry in $HOME/.config/akonadi/agentsrc 
[1] here is a corresponding configuration file in $HOME/.kde/share/config [3].

E.g. if the [Instances] section in agentrc contains an entry for 
akonadi_ical_resource_2, there is also a config file calles 
akonadi_ical_resource_2rc in the KDE config directory.

Depending on the type of data, such config files for resources will have 
filenames or directory names of where the data is stored.

Common locations are KDE's legacy default files, e.g. 
$HOME/.kde/share/apps/korganizer/std.ics [3]

New default locations are files and directories in $HOME/.local/share [1], 
e.g. $HOME/.local/share/contacts

For now (as in actually released versions) the database is merely used for 
caching and keeping structural information (e.g. which addressbook a contact 
belongs to).
This will change when Akonadi is being used for email, since state information 
like read/unread is also stored there (unless the backend is also capable of 
doing this, e.g. IMAP).

> Similarly if I want to synchronise my akonadi data between say a laptop
> and a desktop is there a way to do this?

Not right now, sorry. Best way to do that for the moment is to use the same 
data locations, e.g. groupware server.

> Also is the format the same independent of the database that is used.
> If so can this be used to migrate from MySql to Postgresql?

The database contents are described database independent in an XML file in 
(SVN) kdesupport/akonadi/server/src/storage/akonadidb.xml

At build time this is used as an input to generate the data structures for 
accessing different databases (and some manually optimized queries on top of 
that).

Cheers,
Kevin

-- 
Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer
KDE user support, developer mentoring

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