What is the backup supposed to do? Usecase - transfer profile to a new handset?

General
#1

I have an XA2 Plus as a daily driver, upgraded since about v3.0.4 all the way to 4.4.0.68.

I have a brand new Xperia 10 iii that i flashed to SFOS 4.4.0.68.

I used the backup facility on my XA2 (yesterday) to migrate my profile onto the new 10 iii (restore).

At no point (4.1, 4.2, 4.3**, and now 4.4), has the process ever really achieved anything that I wanted:

I do appear to have migrated some accounts (though they need resupplying with credentials).
I do appear to have my browser shortcuts. Yay.
I do appear to have my calendar events. Yay.
I do not have any notes (though this is fine, as the import process on the X did at least say that this had failed).
I do not have any call/message history (though this is understandable as the sim associated with this activity is not present).
I do not have my Contacts!!! This is a big one (seems to be the very core of what I might want to backup and restore…?).

What exactly should I be expecting from the backup/restore process?

Right now my shiny new daily driver phone has… no Contacts in it.

** Same question asked last year - what’s changed:

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Community meeting on IRC 15th September 2022
#2

Please don’t repost.

#3

Let’s rephrase this then:

Right now my shiny new daily driver phone has… no Contacts in it.

How does one rectify this situation if the backup/restore facility for profile migration does not work?

:slight_smile:

#4

In addition to the above, I must say that I find it pretty amusing that there is no simple way to backup or share ambiences, i.e. what was meant to be SFOS’ unique feature and distinguisher, once tightly connected with TOH’s.

On my XA2U I have a few ambiences made by myself and I thought I could easily move them to the newly bought X10 III. No ***** way. I was shocked when I did not find a “Share” option to just send them to the other phone, nor any other normal way to easily share them, other than manually copying and setting up everything from scratch.

Just amazing.

#5

Yes fucking way.

If I may plug my app ThemeColor, it can convert existing (user-made) ambiences to rpms which you can then transfer.
If you don’t want to install that, you might adapt the tool.

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Ambience transfer
#6

Yes, this ircs me as well. I recently migrated from Xperia 10 to Xperia 10 mk2 and there was no backup from the old phone to be restored on my new phone. Instead I had to manually extract the data I wanted (call history, notes, contacts etc) and import them on the new phone.

Since Sailfish has a backup/restore functionality I would expect it to include restoring between devices.

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#7

Reading this thread here:

It appears that I should not expect the Backup/Restore functionality to cover the usecase of transerring Contacts to a new SFOS handset.

Rather I should use the System Setting > Apps > Contacts > Import function.

And since I will be selecting “Other” rather than “Android” or “Iphone” I will need to import Contacts via vCard file(s).

How does one create an export of the Contact records in vCard file(s) format on my existing XA2 Plus, such that I may trasnfer them onto the new 10 iii?

Many thanks

#8

Turns out the Contacts and Calendar vCard files can be extracted from the backup, and this file then used to via the Manual import in the System Settings > Apps > Contacts import function.

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#9

Great app, does exactly what I needed (and much more). Thanks!
Yet still basic sharing of ambiences should IMO be in the OS by default…

You can simply select all contacts in the People app and share them via Bluetooth to the other phone where they will be automatically imported. Takes a few seconds.

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#10

You can use my nackup from slava to add apps and folders to backup
if you find out where ambiences are…
i did complain about that 4 years ago

backup is a.zip so.you can.look into it and restore what you need, by copy üaste…

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#11

And I complain about it now because whether “I can find out where ambiences are” and copy them manually or using some 3rd party program (i.e. have to do multiple additional actions that otherwise would have been limited to selecting “Share” from the pull down) does not in any way contradict that a simple ambience sharing function should have been built-in since SFOS 0.9, given that ambiences aimed to be one of SFOS’ distinguishing factors and advantages.

Not that it is a deal breaker, but still.

It’s actually a .tar, but yes, one can easily extract anything from it.

I know, and I use it.

But in addition to being able to add things to the backup (which is what slava’s My Backup already provides) I would also very much like to have a possibility to disable certain things from being backed up. For instance, I would like to exclude backing up images or videos, and currently I cannot do it which boost my backups to gigabytes.

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#12

The way we do backups (and encryption) now -and given the possibilities systemd offers (portable home)- is kind of shameful.

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#13

Very nice and useful application. I used it to make rpms with my favorite ambiences for easy reinstallation in the future.

I miss one thing, though - audio settings are not preserved. Would it be possible to also store ringtone and notification (email, SMS, calendar, alarm, etc) settings, along with copying custom audio files (if used) and including them in the rpm?

#14

That is something I have on the roadmap (and I probably have a branch somewhere which attemts that), but I have not yet figured out how to get the sound setting information reliably, and how to find the sound files.

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#15

Would have helped…
I was lucky migrating from XA2 to 10 III with a single “ln -s”.

#16

To keep things clear for other readers I’ve moved this from Bug Reports to the General category.

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