03-03-2016, 04:47 PM
The companion is definitely not designed in a way that would support multiple concurrent tablet connections. While I could change the connection code to support this, the rest of the app definitely isn't set up in a way where you could switch what tablet you are currently looking at. I know you are only thinking of things in term of restoring backups, but I can't really just isolate that one piece when supporting the concept of multiple concurrent connections.
Another possibility would be to modify the companion and tablet to be able to change the port numbers used for the connection. You could then load up multiple companion applications where each one is connected to a different device. In order for this to work well, I'd probably want to add support for specifying the port numbers on the command line so you could load different shortcuts for different devices (so you wouldn't have to change the port numbers each time). I could see some potential problems I'd need to consider (ensuring that I don't lock read access to the backup file while restoring it for example), but I'm sure I could work through those during testing.
If you have enough space on your device, you could also upload the backup file to Dropbox or Google Drive and just restore it from there on each of the devices, but that might wind up slower...
If I recall, the incremental backup feature was more about backing up new information to an existing backup file. The restore of the backup would still be the same though. I hadn't really considered supporting some form of incremental restore. If I moved away from the idea of keeping the backup data all in one file, I guess I could generate an additional file for each incremental backup where that backup file contained only the database file and files that were added since the last backup (calculating the delta between the current library and the backup file is the hard part). I could then in theory allowing restoring of just those incremental pieces which would meet your needs. As long as I linked together the first backup files to all the others, doing a restore wouldn't be too bad, although I could imagine if you started to have a lot of incremental backups, managing all of those files might get troublesome really fast.
I'm a little tired so I think my thoughts are a little jumbled. I'll have to think more on all of this. One other thing for you to consider: I'm not sure how many computers/laptops you have in your home, but each one could be responsible for restoring the backup to one tablet. You can also use VMs with a free application like VirtualBox so that each VM could be restoring to one tablet. If you store the backup file in a shared area (either shared network storage or a shared folder on your PC), I could see that working.
Mike
Another possibility would be to modify the companion and tablet to be able to change the port numbers used for the connection. You could then load up multiple companion applications where each one is connected to a different device. In order for this to work well, I'd probably want to add support for specifying the port numbers on the command line so you could load different shortcuts for different devices (so you wouldn't have to change the port numbers each time). I could see some potential problems I'd need to consider (ensuring that I don't lock read access to the backup file while restoring it for example), but I'm sure I could work through those during testing.
If you have enough space on your device, you could also upload the backup file to Dropbox or Google Drive and just restore it from there on each of the devices, but that might wind up slower...
If I recall, the incremental backup feature was more about backing up new information to an existing backup file. The restore of the backup would still be the same though. I hadn't really considered supporting some form of incremental restore. If I moved away from the idea of keeping the backup data all in one file, I guess I could generate an additional file for each incremental backup where that backup file contained only the database file and files that were added since the last backup (calculating the delta between the current library and the backup file is the hard part). I could then in theory allowing restoring of just those incremental pieces which would meet your needs. As long as I linked together the first backup files to all the others, doing a restore wouldn't be too bad, although I could imagine if you started to have a lot of incremental backups, managing all of those files might get troublesome really fast.
I'm a little tired so I think my thoughts are a little jumbled. I'll have to think more on all of this. One other thing for you to consider: I'm not sure how many computers/laptops you have in your home, but each one could be responsible for restoring the backup to one tablet. You can also use VMs with a free application like VirtualBox so that each VM could be restoring to one tablet. If you store the backup file in a shared area (either shared network storage or a shared folder on your PC), I could see that working.
Mike