Sadly, I just had my hard drive crash last week. Physical failure. Perhaps possible to recover a few things through expensive data recovery, but most all of my data files are stored in the cloud (Dropbox), so not terribly necessary.
That being said, if I had had warning of impending doom, I would have certainly exported all of my many software custom configurations. I searched through some old archives and found some old ones, but they are long out of date, and in the months leading up to the crash I had gotten DOpus to place I was super happy with, and am very disappointed to lose all the work.
What I would love is if there were a way to opt-in to an automatic backup of my configuration file to DOpus servers that I could access and download if I were to have a failure like this again in the future.
I assume that this feature doesn't exist already, but if it does, please let me know!
Absent this (wishful thinking), I could imagine running some scheduled task on a periodic basis to backup my configuration files to my cloud storage which is probably pretty easy. If there's a thread that already covers how to do this, please point me in the right direction.
I just thought this might be pretty cool for DOpus dev folks, too, to see how people are customizing and using DOpus (which might inform future choices).
Automated cloud config sync/backup is something we're thinking about for the long term, but also quite complex to do properly.
Some people run the config-backup command to silently backup the config every time they start Opus. (Or more often, via scripting, but I think that's overkill and can result in performance issues.)
But the config data is all in files you can backup by simply copying a couple of folders, or including them in your regular backups if needed.
Depends how often you want to back things up, and if you're already backing up other data regularly.
(Personally, I just use Settings > Backup & Restore to make a manual backup every so often, but my config doesn't change that often these days. Back when it changed a lot, I used to do incremental backups of my whole C drive each night, which covered that, but it got to be too much trouble keeping track of automated backup tools that hadn't gone wrong in terms of design/reliability.)
I found this handy script here (Settings Auto Backup (Normal and USB)), and I have set it to do a backup weekly and "OnListerUIChange". I have set it up to store the backup file to the cloud.
Do you think that even having this script installed at all can result in performance issues?
I used to do weekly drive images to an external backup drive, but with the rise of hosted storage, I've moved away from that. Also drive images are great for replacing a crashed HD, but not for other types of hardware failures. If you end up replacing / upgrading a computer, that image won't help you. Since it doesn't seem that there's any way around having to install all of your software on your new machine, it seems the next bet is...
The best option for me would be if there were a way I could schedule all of my programs to export all of their customizations to a cloud archive on a regular basis. That would be a reasonable approach. Or even better, if all of my software automatically stored my profile on their servers so when I reinstalled I had the option of reloading my configuration. As software is moving to the cloud and subscription-based, this may work itself out, too.
Nonetheless, thanks for the feedback, Leo! If you happen to find my configuration file in your inbox, you let me know, OK?
They are just some folders on disk, so you could schedule something to copy them to a cloud storage folder if needed. It's a shame none of the cloud storage tools seem able to backup/sync arbitrary folders.
