Add "Turn on backup" context menu option

[burkeholland]

Settings Sync provides a critical service to developers by offering an "always on" backup for VS Code. Every developer should probably have this toggled on so that they can easily restore their VS Code if something catastrophic happens to their system or more likely, they get a new machine.

Unfortunately, the name of the service tends to lend itself to implying that it is for syncing settings across multiple VS Code installations, and or is only good for syncing settings - not the entire configuration of VS Code. This leaves developers unaware that such a backup mechanism exists and likely reconfiguring VS Code manually everytime.

I propose a menu option addition to the context menu which says, "Turn on backup". This option can invoke the Settings Sync action directly. If Settings Sync is on, it should say "Turn off backup". This could help more users to be aware of a feature they will mostly likely badly need in the future.

Considerations...

1. Will it be confusing to be redirected to Settings Sync from such a menu option?
2. Where is the "Restore from Backup" option? Would that also just enable Settings Sync? That could be confusing as well.

[sandy081]

I understand your reason. I have not received any such feedback from the community related to backup. Browsers like Chrome & Edge are also following same terminology for syncing / back up. I am not sure if sync terminology is not leading to back up. It would be great if we can have some data backing this.

[isidorn]

It is hard getting data before trying this out. We could do an experiment for this.

And I agree that we should not get feedback from the community for this. Nobody will say "oh I did not figure out Settings Sync actually helps with backup". Once you figure it out - you just start using it and do not complain. The silent majority are the audience that we are trying to motivate with this.

[sandy081]

Actually my point is what is the reason behind doing the experiment? Do we see users not using this functionality for backing up data or is it just a speculation? Current terminology is same as the one that is used in other popular applications like Chrome - that also syncs and restore.

[burkeholland]

I believe the usage of Settings Sync is quite low compared to overall editor usage - @isidorn can elaborate. That data point makes me think that people are manually setting up new instances because they are unaware that the feature even exists.

[sandy081]

I just remembered that we have an issue already for this similar request - #140117. It has some discussion captured already. If it improves the feature usage, shall we move this to that issue and continue discussion?

[sandy081]

/duplicate

#140117

[vscodenpa]

Thanks for creating this issue! We figured it's covering the same as another one we already have. Thus, we closed this one as a duplicate. You can search for similar existing issues. See also our issue reporting guidelines.

Happy Coding!