#11 Option to enable auto-backups

[Steffen Siebert]

Option to enable auto-backups (once a day?) to prevent
data loss if syncit-server crashes.

It's propably best to create a single html file as backup
(with backup date part of the filename), in a format
which can imported by the browsers.

[Morbus Iff]

Logged In: YES
user_id=69804

There are a couple of different ways to enable backups - all
do-able on your current machines without much effort ("much"
being the operative word). Your bookmarks are stored in XBEL
files in the same dir as the syncit.exe client - creating a
"Scheduled Task" to automatically copy those files to
another directory once a day would be relatively trivial.
XBEL is an XML based bookamrk format, and there are a few
converters online for it.

The other option is to do database dumps on your server
through cron. This is what I run once a week: (cd
/srv/www/htdocs/disobey.com/bookmarks/; mysqldump
disobey_bookmarks > dbs-mysql.dump; gzip -f9 dbs-mysql.dump;
chown morbus dbs-mysql.dump.gz)

[Steffen Siebert]

Logged In: YES
user_id=884962

Both backup possibilities were available as the original syncit
server went down, but lots of people (including me) lost some
or all of their bookmarks. We should learn from this and
provide by default a backup to prevent data loss if something
similar goes wrong. (An option should be available to disable
backups, but the default should be backup enabled)

Instead of XBEL we should use a backup format which at
least one browsers used by the user can import without the
need of converters.

Backups of the server database should be done anyway, but
we definitely need a backup for the end user not running its
own server.

[Morbus Iff]

Logged In: YES
user_id=69804

I could make an XBEL to Mozilla/IE converter (I already have
the code written) but it'd be roughly 2 megs (perl to .exe
conversion). It'd be command-line only too (which wouldn't
be too much of a problem under a Scheduled Task or Shortcut).

[Steffen Siebert]

Logged In: YES
user_id=884962

Why using perl? As far as I know the mozilla/netscape
bookmark format is a single html file which contains all
bookmarks. So the client must already be able to write such
files. It should be easy to create a similar file in the html
format IE can import.

[Morbus Iff]

Logged In: YES
user_id=69804

Welp, I know nothing about the client/MSVC programming, so I
wouldn't be adding any features there (dgehriger would
though, thus, he's been assigned this item). Why not just
tell people to install Mozilla and then ScheduleTask a
conversion? /me ducks jokingly.