I had a crash while trying to find duplicate people. The tree is no longer in the “Manage family trees” dialog. I have a somewhat recent full backup that I can restore just fine. However, there is a few days worth of work that I had done since that backup. I have several autobackups that together would bring me back to just before the crash.
However, I don’t know how the restoration of autobackups is supposed to work. After I restore the full backup, then restore the first of the autobackups, a ton of things (people, events, citations, etc.) get duplicated.
Is there a procedure to restore the autobackups either without duplication or a way to easily de-duplicate? As the crash that took out my tree happened while using the “Find duplicate people” tool, I’m a little gun shy about using that.
.gramps file backups should be imported into into a newly created blank Tree file.
In this case, I would have sorted by modify date and Tagged any that were fresher than the last backup timestamp. So, even if you needed to re-enter them, you could have a checklist.
Since you were in the midst of de-duplicating, some of the Last Modified timestamps may be misleading.
Unfortunately, there is not a quick and easy way to de-duplicate from a redundantly restored file.
However, the autobackups are NOT incremental. They are unfiltered exports to .gramps XML files.
So you did not need to restore a “full” backup and then additional autobackups. (In fact, if the “full” backup is a .gpkg file that includes media, it is a pain to restore. The paths of existing media will fight with the media files being restored. There is a workaround but that is not important since the autobackups are evidently fresher.)
Assuming that the (most recent) autobackup is fresher than the than the full backup, that is the ideal file to restore to the new blank tree file.
Thanks for the info. The autobackups are not “full” backups, when I import an autobackup into a new blank tree, it only imports the items that were changed during that editing session. Instead of restoring nearly 20,000 people in the tree, it imports only the 15 or so I was working on at the time the autobackup was created.
I guess the full backup is all I can restore without a lot of issues. I’ll have to redo the last four days of research, but that’s a lot better than re-doing the last two decades. And it’ll change my backup strategy.
At the bare minimum, you should set Gramps to automatically backup on exit. This is a full backup. Using this strategy, I get at least two full backups of my work a day so at most, all I could lose would be the last session of working with the database.
Of course, it is also important to move any backup off of the hard drive.
Please give more detail about where you are finding this incremental file. The gramps for destops automated backup (timer-based or backup upon exit) does not have a a delta/incremental/differential mode.
The SQLite backend does have a journaling mode. The Gramps Web Sync may have some similar feature and the recent changes gramplets made have some caching.
You are right, I was wrong. Importing an autobackup into a newly created tree does indeed get back everything. I had a filter applied and I was only seeing a subset of people. Facepalm.