[Ideas] Why do people not make backups? How to improve that?

[adw]

@qubist

Your own words:

As you know, there’s an inherent trade-off between security and convenience. Part of the reason that the Qubes backup tool is less convenient is because it’s more secure.

confirm that the usability is not good as it could be.

Not necessarily. Due to the inherent trade-off between security and convenience, it’s possible for a given piece of software to be simultaneously:

1. As convenient as it can be without sacrificing security (i.e., the only way to make it more convenient would be to give up some security), and
2. Less convenient than other options (which are able to be more convenient because they aren’t as secure).

(To be clear, I don’t think the Qubes backup tool, or really any piece of software in the real world, actually achieves this.)

@fsflover

@adw

I let it run while I’m doing other things or sleeping, so the effective time cost for me is just a few minutes.

So either you do not use the graphical UI for backups, or you do not verify your backups.

No, that’s not the case. For example, sometimes I:

1. Start the backup.
2. Go do other stuff.
3. Come back and see that the backup is done. Start the verification check.
4. Go do other stuff.
5. Come back and see that the verification check is done. Do whatever else I need to do with the backup.

Steps 1, 3, and 5 combined don’t take that long, so the total time I actively have to spend on the backup process isn’t that long.

(To be clear, I do think there’s a lot of room for improvement here.)

@fsflover

In the UI, the latter requires to start over the whole procedure again in 5 hours, which is extremely annoying and why I make backups less frequently than I should.

Well, at least the verification doesn’t take nearly as long as the backup itself, so it’s not quite as bad as starting the whole procedure over, but I’ve long thought it would be more convenient to have an option to automatically verify the backup file upon creation.

@fsflover

@adw

@qubist

Is there also a major long-standing and unresolved issue with backup potentially not actually backing up?

Not that I’m aware of.

Here it is.

I think this is different from what he meant. I think he meant something more like “a bug in the backup process that sometimes causes random data to be missing from the backup.” By contrast, this issue is more like, “X isn’t included in backups by default, but users would benefit from it being included, so we should figure out a way to start including X by default.”