A user just posted a question about recovering their Tree after a computer OS being crashed. They had mounted the corrupted OS boot drive as an external drive & wanted to restore the Gramps data to a fresh computer.
It seemed like this might be a task we all will have to do sooner or later.
Could there be a tool built for this specific purpose?
To move the data, they needed to:
- Identify the version of Gramps
- Identify the database backend
- Locate the database files
- Locate the backups (decide if the backups are current)
- Locate the media files
- Transfer copies of the appropriate files to the new system
- Restore the ALL the Trees in the database old folder to the database version in the fresh install of Gramps
- Make current backups
The gramp.ini file has a lot of this information. So a tool that sought out copies of that file & parsed all discovered copies might be able to do most of the location tasks.
However, I noticed that the .ini file does not include some important info for migrating data. Like the version of Gramps, the database engine version, the volumeID for drive letters (or a some sort of relative offset for the path for the gramps.ini with respect to the backup, database & media paths).
There are additional niceties such a tool could do:
- Install the same dependecies
- Install the same add-ons
- Restore preferences (main & add-on)
- Restore report options
- Restore holiday calendars
- Restore report options
- Restore custom filters
- Restore books
- Restore localization