QtMoko backup/restore

[Neil Jerram]

I wonder if anyone is already thinking about or working on backup and
restore for QtMoko when upgrading - i.e. to maintain all your settings
and data across an upgrade?

My thoughts so far on this:

- Most non-system data lives in a separate partition, /media/card, and
  doesn't need handling because an upgrade won't touch that partition.

- For the same reason, /media/card is a good place for backing up
  anything that does need handling.

- Stuff that does need backup and restore is under /home/root: settings,
  email/SMS messages, spectemu ROMs, web browser stuff, and so on.
  Unfortunately this is a mixture of genuine user data and
  application-generated runtime state, and I think it would be better to
  let the new distribution regenerate the latter.  So possibly that
  means that we can't just save and restore the whole of /home/root.
  But maybe the algorithm can be "save and restore the whole of
  /home/root except for a manageably small number of exceptions".

- Maybe also backup and restore /etc/ssh/*key*, to avoid having to
  delete the old key on SSH clients?

- It should be pretty quick and easy to write scripts to do this.  A GUI
  would be nice, but that can come later.

Thoughts?  Does anyone already have such scripts?

Regards,
        Neil