What are the essential and optional items that should be included in automated backup? I use SQLite for Digikam DB. Since some items are tiny and some are huge, I plan to use separate backup sets.
Here is my initial plan, please comment:
Images, videos, sidecar files
If using SQLite Database (I don’t use this)
Essential:
digikam4.db
Optional:
thumbnails-digikam.db
recognition.db
similarity.db
If using MySQL/MariaDB:
.mysql.digikam
This dir is over 40GB, can it be split, is everything there needed? Or is this really a MariaDB backup question?
%LOCALAPPDATA%\digikam\
This about 1GB, possibly rebuildable cache items, ok to skip?
Small items:
%LOCALAPPDATA%\digikam_systemrc
%LOCALAPPDATA%\digikamrc
%LOCALAPPDATA%\showfotorc
%LOCALAPPDATA%\kdeglobals
%LOCALAPPDATA%\kxmlgui5\digikam
Reference:
So, are you, or are you not using SQLite? While they are both SQL-based database servers, SQLite and MariaDB are completely different beasts.
For SQLite, I have a digikam4.db of about 83 MB, and a thumbnails-digikam.db
of about 1.3 GB (so 15× larger, not unexpected). That’s for an image collection including sidecars of over 650 GB.
So frankly, I’m not bothered at all by the size of the database with regards to backup (< 1% of total…)
Some of those %LOCALAPPDATA%\* files you mention are configuration files (anything *rc is a configuration file). Others may be cache (I’m using Linux, so different file system layout).
But here as well, is the size important relative to the size of your image collection?
Keep in mind that rebuilding files that you could have stored imply that you have to wait for the rebuilding. E.g. if you have siecars for all image and video files, you don’t need to back up the database, as it can be rebuild. Same for thumbnails. But that process can take hours (or even days for a large image collection).
Thanks for catching the typo. I mentioned SQLite in case anyone else would benefit from the details). I use MariaDB.
My MariaDB (.mysql.digikam folder) is 80GB unzipped, 40GB zipped. My concern is that the automated backup runs for over an hour with uncompressed backup setting and much longer if adding compression. This increases the risk that the automated backup will rarely finish.
Trying to figure out what not to backup from the DB folder: I ran clean the DB from Digikam, so the files should be slim and updated. I see a bunch of files with “modification date” a few months from before the 8.7 upgrade. Is it a good/bad idea to try delete them? I am guessing this might be more of MariaDB maintenance question?