Thank you very much for the detailed answer. First of all, let me be clear that I am neither complaining nor accusing anyone or anything around the backup topic. I am an IT professional for more than 25 years and among the dying species that actually does RTFM. I spent countless hours during the past many years to learn about OpenHAB from all sources I could find. OpenHAB is definitely not easy to learn but it is extremely powerful and incredibly stable, this is why I like it so much.
Of course, you can now live your frustration about all the stupid idiots out there like me that are struggling with the backup topic. And it’s obvious that there are lots and lots of users struggling with it, as you recognized yourself. Or, well, you may want to recognize that there is a need for a large part of the OpenHAB user base to clarify and guide the backup topic more than it was done until now. This would be some effort but would in the long-term significantly reduce the amount of such discussions with the community.
When you open the page Introduction | openHAB, you will not find the word “backup” or “restore” at all. I believe it would be a game changer for this topic if, under the “Administration Guide”, there would be a section “Configuration Backup / Restore” that explains what you probably already explained in countless postings.
I am running OpenHAB in docker as well (well, the QNAP Container Station incarnation of docker) and I am backing up all the Persistent Folders (conf, add-ons, userdata) which currently cover all my text files, and the jsondb folder, too. The jsondb folder mainly covers Things, Items, Pages, Widgets, Rules, it seems, which is great. So the missing part would be general OpenHAB config (timezone, location, etc.), persistence and bindings, I guess. Would be great to have an alternative to the openhab-cli because on my setup this is not a preferred option. Is there another way to back general config parameters up? And is there anything that is not backed up at all?
So at the moment, to restore an OpenHAB installation, I would need a fresh install of OpenHAB, I’d need to enter the general config, add the bindings, and then I only need to copy back the jsondb folder, restart OpenHAB, and everything is back there and working (all things, items, widgets, rules, etc.)? And I need to manually config the persistence again (or have a copy of the related config text files). So we are with quite a number of manual steps already that are not necessarily straight forward for the average OpenHAB user. Hence, some clear guidance in the “Administration Guide” would be very helpful.
Even more, if openhab-cli can provide a full config backup and restore, why is it not possible to provide a backup / restore option in the MainUI itself that does the same? This together with some guidance in the “Administration Guide” would end this topic once and for all