Simple way to export an entire database

[oschuett]

It would be nice if there were a simple way to export an entire AiiDA database.
This would be very useful for collaboration and backup alike.

[ltalirz]

Not sure what others have to say on this, but in my opinion this should even be the default behavior of verdi export, when the user does not specify any of the options for selecting nodes.
Perhaps a warning with click.confirm would be appropriate.

[giovannipizzi]

We're working on this - at this stage, I would rather add a --all-nodes flag, both because the current export is a bit slow (and can run out of memory) if too many attributes are exported, and because there are some things (notably, the new call links) that are not exported.
With @szoupanos we're improving the export, in the future it could be the default (or at least it might be the default of the push/pull commands @szoupanos is developing)

[ltalirz]

@szoupanos I think this is very important, in particular since people working with aiida now start to have to back up their stuff for DMPs.
I believe we should add this in 0.12.x for this reason

P.S. For a first fix, no need to worry about efficiency if this would complicate things - it's just important to have the flag (i.e. something like an equivalent to adding all nodes to group and exporting the group).

P.P.S. To also give some thumbs up: There was some work with aiida I did in 2015, which I never exported, so all I had was a DB of an old postgres version and the .aiida directory. I installed the postgres version + aiida 0.12.1, and the migrations + export worked perfectly, so well done with the backwards compatibility!

[ltalirz]

Discussion April 17th, 2019:

• to add --all option, which exports: all nodes (with extras), groups, users, computers, comments, logs
  • add both in 1.0 and 0.12
  • if anything is not taken by default, mention this in the documentation!
  • mention that this is not the same as a database backup, since PKs will change
• to decide in the future whether you might want to make this option the default (depending on what users usually want when doing verdi export)