User configuration backup

Why you would want to do this

If you are going to reinstall your system, and have some custom configuration, you may save some time by making a backup of your configuration and restoring it on the new system, rather than going through the menus to recreate it.

How to do it

Index/search configuration

The main recoll configuration data is normally kept inside '~/.recoll' or whatever $RECOLL_CONFDIR is set to.

This directory contains both configuration files and generated index data.In a standard configuration, the following files and directories contain generated data:

  • 'xapiandb' contains the Xapian index, which normally consumes most of the total space.

  • 'aspdict.en.rws' contains the aspell dictionary used for spelling corrections.

  • 'mboxcache' contains cached offset data for email messages inside mbox folders.

  • 'webcache' contains saved web pages. This is more than a cache as destroying it will purge the corresponding data during the next indexing.

The other files are either very small or contain configuration data.

If you want to only save configuration, using minimum space, you can destroy the above files and directories (with the possible exception of 'webcache'). Then taking a copy of the '.recoll' directory and adding the GUI configuration data described in the next will get you a full configuration data backup.

GUI configuration

The parameters set from the Query configuration Qt menus are stored in Qt standard places:

  • '~/.qt/recollrc' for Qt 3.x

  • '~/.config/Recoll.org/recoll.conf' for Qt 4 and later

Other data

If you wish to save index data in addition to the customisation files, which only makes sense if the document access paths do not change after reinstallation, you can just take a backup of the full '.recoll' directory, taking care that the storage locations for some data elements can be changed (not be inside '.recoll'):

  • The index data is normally kept inside '~/.recoll/xapiandb', but the location of this directory can be modified by the dbdir configuration parameter if it is set (check 'recoll.conf').

  • If you use the Firefox Recoll plugin, the WEB history cache is normally kept inside '~/.recoll/webcache', but the location can be modified by the webcachedir configuration parameter.