Active apps are disrupted by backups. How do we mitigate it?

[t-m-w]

There are many different ways that this could be improved, some lower-hanging fruit than others, and there are also multiple ways to interpret "active app". Figured I would start a conversation.

Resolution of #316 / #896 / #780 would certainly help this, as they would mitigate the disruption to some extent, but consider the case where someone has to make a late-night emergency trip, etc.: ideally they wouldn't be disrupted. So, if Seedvault wanted to do something smarter, here are some miscellaneous, unsorted ideas.

Some examples of apps that users may consider "active" -- technical details like detection mechanisms are important, but intentionally not considered in this list:

• App currently being displayed on the screen. (Is it still "active" if the screen is off?)
• An app playing media.
• An alarm app that is currently going off.
• A navigation app.
• Anything running while the screen is on (so, add an option to not start a backup while screen is on?).

And how would these be handled? Some possibilities:

• Display a high-importance notification for each occurrence that asks the user what they want to do, proceeding automatically after a timeout (but with what action with regard to the app?).
• Collect a list of active apps to ask the user about after the other apps are done, potentially to proceed later.
• Simply skip an active app a max of N times before backing it up anyway (and thus killing it as before). It would be nice to warn before doing this, perhaps with a notification described earlier; so maybe this would be an approach where notification is the last resort...?

Implementation ideas/challenges. Some possibilities:

• Prompt about "active" apps as early as possible, moving them to the end of the process to give more time for an answer.
• Allow amending existing snapshots with data for apps whose backup was delayed. Is this feasible?
• Have follow-up snapshot files that include only the data of delayed-backup apps, that only get deleted when their parent snapshot is deleted. Is this feasible?

There are certainly downsides in addition to the upsides to some of these ideas, and perhaps none is the right approach. Thoughts welcome.

[grote]

Thanks for the ideas. A problem I see is that backups may run for some time and we kind of need to have the list of apps we want to back up at the beginning and during that time, the active app may change frequently. Also, the design of the current backup system doesn't really support partial snapshots.

Together with #316 one could also consider running backups only when phone is considered "idle". In practice, we've seen this to cause scheduling delays though. Maybe it could be an option in scheduling settings.

[t-m-w]

The "idle" idea could be a nice improvement for some folks, but due to the problem you mentioned, I believe it would need some extra support apart from simply being toggleable. I think we once talked about a max-idle-time-before-backup sort of setting. That may help, and/or notifying the user and prompting a manual backup or to turn off the idle setting, after a certain amount of time has elapsed with no backup occurring.

Your device hasn't been backed up in X days

Check your backup settings...
[Backup now] action

Something to that effect.