For the last few weekends I’ve been working on a series of changes to streamline Kopia UI snapshot creation flows. The changes are not huge on the surface but there was a ton of engineering required to make this happen.
Please take a look at the quick screen cap that shows the new snapshot creation and policy editing flow:
Notable changes:
new snapshot creation was moved to its own page
added support for estimating snapshot size (to test the ignore rules) and quick policy editing while in creation flow
policy list now has a search option and ability to quickly create policies for local paths
unified look and feel of Snapshots and Policies tabs
I’d appreciate feedback on those changes and suggestions for improving the UI are always welcome.
Once those changes are in (hopefully early next week), I’m planning to cut 0.8.0-beta1 release.
Looks good already. What’s really great, is that policies can be set, before a actual snapshot is run - something which has always been a bit cumbersome, when running a Kopia server, since the client won’t see the default repo policy. Up to now, I always had to run a snapshot and immdiately stop it, to be able to set a policy, where I can define compression or files to ignore.
This looks awesome. As a new user, same as @budy, I couldn’t find how to set up the parameters of the snapshot before the first snapshot. The flow has become much more intuitive.
A question related to the interface: there is no password checking when users browse the backed up data (which lives in a veracrypt volume on my computer, unlocked at start), and KopiaUI starts by default with windows. Isn’t this a security risk? Would it useful to have an option to ask the password at start up?
Depends on how paranoid you are… I’d rather have a very strong repo password and have that one secured in my keychain on my account, then a password I can actually remember and I have to type in each time, I want to start KopiaUI.
You’d need to secure the physical acccess to your acount anyway… so keep people out of your account and having your repo password in a local secure storage is not that big of a deal. Also, you don’t even to have our repo on a veracrypt volume… it doesn’t hurt, but Kopia’s encryption is well beyond “good-enough”.
Well, afaiks Windows also hosts a keychain solution, so as long as your account is not broken into, but “only” your hard drive got stolen, having the repo password in the Windows keychain should protect you well enough, since you’d need the account password for opening that up.
I’d rather have a very strong repo password and have that one secured in my keychain on my account, then a password I can actually remember and I have to type in each time, I want to start KopiaUI.
