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Backing-Up (and Restoring) your Data

Overview

Once again, every time you do any work in the WSL-ROS Environment it's really important that you run a backup script before you close it down and log out of the University Machine that you are working on. To do so is very easy, simply run the command below from any WSL-ROS Terminal Instance:

wsl_ros backup

This will create an archive of your Linux Home Directory and save it to your University U: Drive. Whenever you launch a fresh WSL-ROS Environment again on another day, or on a different machine, simply run the following command to restore your work to it:

wsl_ros restore

Remember

Your work will not be preserved within the WSL-ROS Environment between sessions unless you happen to log back in to the same computer again within a few hours!

To make things a little easier, on launching WSL-ROS, the system will check to see if a backup file already exists from a previous session. If it does, then the system will ask you if you want to restore it straight away:

Restore Prompt

Enter Y to restore your data from this backup file, or N to leave the backup file alone and work from fresh (none of your previous work will be restored).

Backup exclusions

By default, the backup process backs up everything in the /home/student/ folder, except for some specific exclusions. This is is done to keep the backup/restore process relatively quick and the process footprint small. When you run the wsl_ros backup script for the first time, a list of exclusions is generated and placed at ~/.backup_exclusions.

At the moment, the standard list of exclusions looks like the following:

  .cache
  .config
  .dbus
  .gazebo
  .ignition
  .landscape
  .local
  .ros
  .rviz
  .sdformat
  .vscode-server

Info

Most of these folders contain temporary data, re-created upon request by the respective processes.

If for some reason you would like to exclude any additional files or folders in your home directory from the backup, simply add your exclusions at the bottom of the list in ~/.backup_exclusions, one on each line.

These settings will be carried over, so you only need to do it once.