Comments on: On transferring settings…

By: Comcastuser

Comcastuser — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 00:52:00 +0000

Try this. It worked for me.

http://www.go-evolution.org/FAQ#How_can_I_completely_backup_evolution.3F

By: Cliff Wells

Cliff Wells — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 23:32:09 +0000

For those who keep suggesting it, copying ~/.evolution doesn't work. It's pretty damn annoying and I'm all for Evolution dropping the whole registry (gconf) stuff. It used to be (in a happier day) that you could simply copy your home directory to a new box and be 90% done. Hell, even Microsoft has suggested that perhaps the registry isn't the best place to keep application data, why are GNOME applications repeating their mistake? I fail to see the advantages over flat files but the disadvantages are painfully clear whenever you need to upgrade or move to a new machine.

As for server-side filters, this doesn't work on all servers (specifically, managing virtual mail accounts where users probably don't have a shell account). Besides, this is tangential to the issue under discussion which is the ugly Windows-like road GNOME (and GNOME applications) are taking with Gconf.

It makes me miss Unix.

By: Scott Bronson

Scott Bronson — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 07:20:56 +0000

Amen Ben. Filters absolutely do need to be server-side. The biggest problem that I see is making a good, consistent interface to configure them. Sieve is a truly horrid language. Unfortunately, nothing else exists! Courier Maildrop, procmail, yampl, these are all meant to be used by administrators, not users.

So... Maybe Hula will demonstrate how to solve this problem?

By: Ben Francis

Ben Francis — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 17:15:03 +0000

This is why mail filters need to be server-side! In fact, I’m in favour of making clients thinner and servers fatter, keeping all your settings centrally on the network. This has its disadvantages of course, mainly the “offline problem”, this needs resolving.

By: Sankar

Sankar — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 07:50:49 +0000

Copy and paste your $HOME/.evolution/mail/filters.xml

It is better to back up your entire ~/.evolution and move it wherever you want to migrate.

By: chris

chris — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 07:37:34 +0000

There's always the OS X way. Something like

~/Library/Application Support/Evolution/filters.xml

By: Jim (linuxactivist)

Jim (linuxactivist) — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 15:29:56 +0000

This is definitely a problem.

Outlook, ostensibly Evolutions rival in the workplace, makes it very easy to back up your settings and data to a single file that can then be copied to another machine and imported.

Even nicer is that you can export sections of your outlook data so that contacts, mail, etc can be in separate files. Say you want to share your contacts with someone, you just export you contacts to a pst file and they can import it. Very nice.

Evolution should be this easy or easier to use.

Before you think I am just bashing Evolution, it has had some features that Microsoft just got around to including in Outlook within the last few years. Evolutions vfolders are great. I used examples of how I use them to explain in Evolution to explain how they might use Microsoft's implementation (which is a tad confusing).

Cheers.

Jim

By: Kagou

Kagou — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 14:22:49 +0000

This script allow to backup completely your evolution to another place : http://www.tux-planet.fr/blog/?2006/05/19/76-evolution-backup-script

But in fact i don’t understand why there is no : “export your settings” or “export filters” or “Make a backup” in evolution

By: Karl Lattimer

Karl Lattimer — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 14:09:23 +0000

There really needs to be some work on this, something like a cross between sabayon but able to gather more information about a currently active profile and a methodology of creating an archive of that profile, bunging it on a USB storage device, across a network or firewire or [insert obscure connectivity method here]

Broken down into 3 chunks would probably be best,

desktop configuration, themes, general settings etc...
user specific configuration, like mail, IM, keyrings
system configuration which applies only to the current machine

Having some kind of autostart method for usb devices could be cool, e.g. i plug in my usb storage device, gnome spots a file called .gnome-configuration.tar.bz2 and it pops up a dialog saying Gnome has detected a desktop configuration profile on the attached device, would you like me to apply the configuration to this desktop? With 3 checkboxes for each of chunks of configuration and a yes/no or something like that. Similarly, if you create the configuration profile on one machine, you could start up the transfer utility on another and through some kind of magic (smb/http) you could tell the settings transfer app to import settings from that machine.

MacOS has something like this, but even that doesn't go as far as it could, for instance you can only synchronise between two computers via firewire (not even an ethernet crossover is supported), to accompany this there should also bet a way of backing up your entire profile including your user files and any dot folders not processed by the sabayon-like-settings-transfer-wizard-thing in order to smoothly upgrade from one desktop to another, hacks should then be incorporated to transpose configurations between gnome 2.4 and 2.16 for instance. This gives the user both an easy upgrade path and a way of synchronising their settings between workstations.

By: therning.org/ magnus » Yes, GConf synch would be good!

therning.org/ magnus » Yes, GConf synch would be good! — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 11:52:19 +0000

[...] Jono is complaining about moving Evloution setting between machines. GConf can’t be synched easily between machines. Maybe the GConf diff tool could be a start of a proper synch tool for GConf? [...]