Advanced scheduling support

This is intended as a gathering place for suggestions we’ve received around the admittedly limited scheduling support in Deja Dup.

These suggestions have not yet been acted upon mostly because we don’t want to add more complexity to the UI and code for “advanced” use cases (note that Deja Dup is not trying to be a one-stop-shop backup program).

But if the GNOME design team feels like any of these should be done, please chime in and we’d be happy to listen.

Ideas

• Select what time of day a backup starts
  • (currently a random time in the middle of the night, or the next time you log in)
• More options for the interval between backups
  • (currently, just daily, 2-day, 3-day, and weekly can be chosen)
• Allow choosing small interval times, like hours
• Allow backing up as soon as anything changes
• Allow choosing which day of the week a weekly backup happens
  • (currently gets reset to whatever day the last backup happened)
• Allow choosing the full-backup interval, where Deja Dup will stop making incremental backups and make a fresh full backup
  • (currently 90 days)
• Backing up based on SSID (i.e. only at home, not at cafe, kind of thing)
• Keeping different amounts of scheduled backups around (like, keeping the last 2 monthly backups plus the last 5 weekly backups)

Workarounds

If you can edit your Deja Dup settings manually (dconf-editor or the gsettings command line might work), you can change the periodic-period key to the number of days between backups that you’d like. For example, changing it to 2 will cause scheduled backups to occur every two days.

You can also change the full-backup-period key from the default of 90 days there.