Ubuntu Wiki

• Launchpad Entry: unified-disk-manager

Summary

There have been many requests for different disk management utilities, and all of them can be summed up into one configuration GUI, which should be included in Ubuntu. Has a brainstorm idea at http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/5722/

Rationale

There are many common disk management tasks that can only be accomplished by the command-line or using apps that require downloading from the repositories. These tasks are common enough and simple enough that they should be integrated together and included by default.

Use Cases

• Bob wants to check the status of his hard-drive via S.M.A.R.T. so he goes to System>Administration>Disk Management and sees that it's working fine.

• Jane is running out of disk space, so she goes to System>Administration>Disk Management and runs the disk cleanup wizard.

Scope

Provide a desktop-agnostic backend, with a frontend for Gnome and KDE.

Design

Very rough:

Tab 1: Free Space -integrate Baobab (and remove it from the applications menu) -create an extensible disk cleaner with default plugins for emptying the trash, clearing the firefox cache, possibly deleting logfiles (using policykit), etc.

Tab 2: Health -allow setting frequency of fsck, so an option something like: [x]Automatically check my disks every [35] boots. -a button for immediately checking all filesystems -S.M.A.R.T. integration

Tab 3: Backup -a scheduled backup utility that can image the entire disk or zip certain folders using cron. -allow creating multiple backup 'profiles' for advanced scheduling -incremental backup would be nice, but probably difficult

Tab 4: Advanced -integrate the partition editor from the installer, and enhance it to allow fstab editing as well

BoF agenda and discussion