High frustration over new backup method

[razanur]

I’ve been an early adopter and supporter of e/OS on FP. Been loving the sh*t out of it, helped put it on at least 6 phones so far - and I was planning to give workshops in our community center to help people get it on their phone.

However, I’m reconsidering right now. The reason? The recent changes with the backup.

I’m desperately looking what I’m missing here! I just received my sisters phone from repairs and need to decide if I put e/OS back on it or not!

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Before diving into the negatives, let me say the one positive: it looks much cleaner and easier to setup up than before! Let’s be honest, with seedvault it was restricted to us nerds. Nobody in my family (except me) had it set up. Now it looks like they are trying (but failing*) to make it easy. I’m happy that option exists.

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So; why am I so angry about the new backup?

Vendor lock-in / Interoperability
First and foremost because it replaced seedvault and the way it works now is in my opinion exactly opposed to the purpose of e/OS and murena! The reason I love(d) it, is because it frees me from major providers (google/apple) and gives ME the choice, without too much loss of convenience. Seedvault did that partially. I could chose whatever service and provider (including my own hardware at home) and easily switch. Also to another provider then e/foundation. However, the switch to the new backup does not allow that! Why?

**Can Murena Workspace be self-hosted? **
A self-hosted version of Murena Workspace exists, but it is outdated and we don’t plan to update it in the short term.

/e/OS 4.0 & Murena Workspace: Updates, new features and FAQ

i.e. the backup feature is not included and I can’t point the backup app at another URL anyway.

So now my backups are locked-in with murena forever. I can never switch to another ROM, without losing all my data (I cannot even use other backup providers, as those require me to root, which mean I lose all my data). I really feel betrayed by e/OS!

Usability issues

1. This new feature silently invalidated the seedvault backup (which I finally got to work the way I wanted it to). I could have gone a year without backup without noticing! That made me really angry! It also made me angry that I’ll have to work out how to make it work correctly again.

2. I use Firefox as my password manager in android. Upon starting the app, it didn’t work and it was unclear. It seems like I needed to (temporarily?) switch to the new built-in password manager. I only hope I don’t need to permanently do that. I have 20 years worth of credentials stored in FF and it’s set up on all my devices.

3. Backups fail because of space. As others have noted, the app doesn’t give you much choice what to (and what not to) backup. Even with all optional options turned off, it seems to take too much space.

FP6 A16 4.1.1 Backup in Murena Cloud Problem

Similar problem here. I’ve been using e/OS with a custom Nextcloud server, and until now, it worked well. But it looks like the backups app is the first to use a Murena-specific API instead of the generic Nextcloud API, so I can’t get it to work.

However, it also doesn’t tell me how much space I would need. So right now, even if somehow I would be willing to be bullied into buying cloud space and give up interoperability (and it’s not that I’m per-se unwilling to pay; I have donated to e/foundation before! I could also see myself buying cloud subscriptions for my family to make it easy), I don’t even know how much to get.

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P.s.: I made my own post, even though some exist (see below), because I was surprised to find some points were not addressed anywhere and I didn’t want to hijack discussions.

Seedvault murena 4.1.1

Where's the Seedvault in the /E/os 4.1.1 version? - Moto G42

I recently updated from /e/OS 4.0 to 4.1 on my Moto G42, and with that, I noticed that the backup area has changed—it’s now required to be online (using Murena’s services)—and I couldn’t find Seedvault anywhere. So why did they remove it? Instead of adding it? I only back up locally (and encrypted) to my SD card, and even if I switched to Murena Backup, I’d have to pay to expand the storage, since the free 1GB doesn’t even cover 1/3 of the space I need. This goes against all the philosophies of…

*forgivable, sometimes it takes some iterations

[GabrielT]

Week 33, Development and Testing Updates

Could not agree more. To the different persons complaining about the loss of seedvault, I have a question for you: Did you ever succeed to restore a useful backup using seedvault And was the content of the backup of any practical use ? I have tried the original seedvault implementation countless times, using a USB-stick, the SD-card or even the internal storage of the phone and then copying the files to a PC. In the first two cases, the backup simply failed most of the tim…

[AnotherElk]

@razanur

So now my backups are locked-in with murena forever.

Week 33, Development and Testing Updates

Seedvault should be back by v4.3. The team would be adding it as one of the options in the Backup screen. The ability to add other backup options on the same screen is also being considered.

Week 33, Development and Testing Updates

The decision to switch to an alternative to SeedVault was triggered in part by the number of complaints we received from users about it not working as expected. It was also not fully implemented in /e/OS. Murena Backup is expected to address these concerns and will be the default backup solution in upcoming builds. We will also provide users with the option to link other backup applications of their choice. The limitation is that only one backup solution can be active on a device at a time, w…

[razanur]

Sigh of relief. I want to keep loving e/OS.

Thank you both for your replies. I have to admit, like the thread @AnotherElk quoted (which I somehow missed :/) it also felt a bit like an attempt to lock-in and increase income to me. The latter would be understandable, the former would for me be inexcusable. I understand money is needed to keep development going. Again, have and will donate, and I will likely get subscriptions for some of my family members – but only if it works well and I can get them out if they want to switch away.

@GabrielT If there is a real way to self-host the new thing, I’m fine with abandoning seedvault. It’s not like I necessarily want to self-host, but I sure want to have the option!

Towards your question: actually seedvault had saved my butt just a few months ago. Phone broke, could restore pretty much everything to the new phone.
I had near 100% coverage:

• Nearly all apps worked, except banking apps (which is probably a good thing). I had the foresight to configure for Signal, WhatsApp, and Threema to place their backups in a folder and manually add that to the seedvault backup. That restored those perfectly. Telegram ofc doesn’t do E2E, so backups are not needed
• Android settings (icon placement, wifi passwords, background image, etc) were handled perfectly.
• Photos are possible by specifying the folder to back up, but I prefer to do that with (self-hosted) ente.io anyway (which is also so much more than just backup!)
• The rest (calendar, sms, contacts) was already covered before if you logged in with a murena account (which is one of the original reasons why I chose e/OS - it just works so much better out of the box than most other ROMs).

So at least in my case I seriously lost something here. I’m very happy murena is trying to do something better (see also the intro of my message). Backup is a very important issue considering the role smartphones take in our lives these days.
The lock-in together with the effectively ceased support for self-hosting was just a major red flag for me. And it made me mad that something working badly was replaced with something not working at all (at least in my case) without even notifying users and giving them a choice.

[significant_otter]

I’m very happy that Seedvault will come back (would’ve hated to part with /e/os over this, but backups to my own Nextcloud are essential to me - I’ve put a lot of work into multi-local, ransomware protected server backups and want all my important data to make use of that).
Still, the silent invalidation of the existing backup system leaves me worried. I only noticed by accident, because someone asked me how I backup my mobile devices (turns out, shockingly: I don’t ).
I hope, that Murena will handle these things more careful in the future.

@GabrielT Seedvault backups have saved me multiple times already. The process is a bit fumbly, yes, but in the end there aren’t much alternatives that are e2e encrypted and not vendor-locked-in.
For me it has been working great (for example when I moved from DivestOS to /e/os), but admittedly, I work in IT and probably invest a bit more time and thought into backups than most people.