Testing Evolution and Firefox Back Up
 

hi all,

i'm trying to test my evolution and backup strategy using two different users, A and B.

i have evolution set up on account A. this has been my main email account for some time. i read that you should be able to copy .evolution and drop it in place of another account's .evolution file and it should contain all your email, etc...

well, i tested this by copying my A's .evolution file and pasting it over B's .evolution file (actually, I just moved B's .evolution file).

when i started evolution for user B, it didn't pick up any settings and it tried to set me up as a new account.

needless to say, i don't have any confidence this backup scheme, as implemented by yours truly, will work when i upgrade to 8.04.

i made sure that everyone had read/write on the .evolution file, so permission shouldn't be an issue. i made user B's .evolution file owned and grouped by user B.

I basically did the same thing with .mozilla (for firefox) and user B's firefox wants me to start from scratch, too.

if you have any idea what i've done wrong, i'd appreciate it if you'd let me know how to get this done right.

i'm looking forward to jumping from 2006 ubuntu to 2008 ubuntu!

tia...

I think Evolution can be backed up from the program itself. Look under File menu for Backup Settings

I also think firefox can be backed up by going to /home/USERNAME/.mozilla/firefox.

In there, there should be a folder with .default at the end of it, copy the contents inside of that folder into the folder on the new user in the same place but with a different set of numbers/letters at the beginning of the folder before the .default. The extentions and plugins folders in .mozilla should just be able to be copied over.

Hope that helps,


Mat

hi Mat,

thaks for the reply. i'm using evolution 2.8.1 and it doesn't have a back up option. perhaps only new versions of evolution have the back up option.

do i need to elevate permissions to do a backup of evolution? i tried...

sudo evolution

...but it started a brand new instance of evolution, probably for the root user.

i did get the firefox back up working, though. it turns out that the permissions of sub files were not right.

I clicked on the...

Left click file -> Properties -> Permissions -> Apply permissions to enclosed files

...button after I updated the permissions, but it didn't actually apply the permissions to the enclosed files, just the top directory.

i've found this evolution 2.8 back up instruction...

http://ubuntu.wordpress.com/2005/12/...kup-evolution/

...

but it fails for me when i get to...

$gconftool-2 --unload evolution_setting.xml
$gconftool-2 --load evolution_setting.xml

the failure text is as follows:

I/O warning : failed to load external entity "evolution_setting.xml"
Failed to open `evolution_setting.xml': No such file or directory

so the file isn't there. i searched my directory and it doesn't come up.

i will try the script posted in his instructions and see if that works.

Did you ever figure out how to backup Evolution? I'm searching for same answer.

Yes .evolution does contain all the mail, addresses, etc. It's a permissions issue and a irritating thing to get the new evolution started since you are forced to enter something in the wizard before it will start the first time.

I was able to manually move the .evolution folder from user A to user B.

first create user B and go through the evolution set up entering just enough false information to get the "forward" button in the wizard to proceed. Once that is done evolution will open.

Then go back to user A or if user B is a sudo user just do it all from there.

In terminal type

sudo must be used to copy it over but this of course puts root permissions on the resulting ".evolution" which will cause errors when loading userB's evolution.

will fix the problem but you might want to have a look at the permissions of userA's .evolution and use that instead of 777 which makes it accessible to anyone. Either way the permissions have to allow userB's evolution to access the folders and files which have permissions set for userA.

Or in newer versions just use the backup option under file and then restore in the other users evolution from that backup. Permissions may still be an issue which makes the manual way more of a sure fire way to make it work.

Evolution Backup and Restore Works but Labels are missing
 

I found that the backup and restore worked fine, however I lost the color labels on my emails. For me this is criticle The label color's are lost.
Is there a way to maintain the label color's?
How is the label color information stored? You would think it would be part of the config files or part of the meta data in the email, but I cannot find it.

Regards, Eric

You would think either method would work. Sorry, I'm not sure because I don't use color lables.

Could it be something stored in the system wide install directories that's not in the /home/user/.evolution directory?

I'll play around and see if I figure it out. Might be a while for me but if I do, I'll post it.

Fixed...
 

Okay, after lots of attempts I figured out the problem. I was moving an account from an x86_64 system to an i586 (32 bit). The migration from an older version to the new version of evolution would not work.

When I tested moving the account from and old x86_64 to a new x86_64, then everything worked perfectly.

Regards, Eric