Mailman 3 November 2023 - Bit-dev

Announcement: New BiT version 1.4.0 released today
by BiT dev Feb. 1, 2024

Feb. 1, 2024

Dear BiT friends, we have published a new stable BiT release today and as always we are happy to get your feed-back. https://github.com/bit-team/backintime/releases/tag/v1.4.0 Installation instructions: https://github.com/bit-team/backintime/blob/dev/CONTRIBUTING.md#build--inst… Best regards BiT developer team

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BIT 1.4.1-1: Restore process is not what I expected. Have I misunderstood it ?
by LateJunction Dec. 7, 2023

Dec. 7, 2023

I am having difficulty in setting up backintime-qt to function as I expect; I would appreciate advice from experienced users. I’m running BIT 1.4.1-1 under Linux Mint 21.2 Cinnamon (based on Ubuntu Jammy), with Kernel 6.2.0-37. Hardware is 11th Gen Intel Core i5-11600, with 32 GiB. /Root and /Home are on separate NVME SSDs. Back up is to a 1TB 7200 rpm HDD. An nVidia 3060 GPU with 12 GiB of memory is installed. This post is about the process of restore, which seems to operate different to my expectation. That expectation is that a file which exists in the ‘original’ location in the file system at the time of restore will be overwritten by the file of the same name from the ‘full’ backup. This will in turn be overwritten by any later files of that file name in the sequence of incremental backups, from oldest to most recent, no matter how many incremental backups there are. The final state of the file will be identical to the newest incremental backup prior to the restore operation. There will be just a single file ‘A’ in the original location.. This is the process that every backup application, using incremental backups, appears to work, according to my understanding of the application descriptions that I have read on Google and YouTube. In contrast. the Man Page, for BIT, under the heading ‘DESCRIPTION’ says: “When you restore a file ‘A’, if it already exists on the file system it will be renamed to ‘A.backup.currentdate’.” I understand ‘currentdate’ to mean ‘current date and time to a sufficient resolution for file name to be unique’ – probably to the millisecond. The manual page statement then implies that after the restore, my data set will contain a file ‘A’ plus as many versions of the file A.backup.currentdate’ as there are unique versions of File A in the incremental backups. This could be 10’s to hundreds of additional file versions for EVERY file in my data set which has been changed in the period from the initial, or ‘full’ backup, to the last incremental backup. This could result in the original file location being filled to capacity, at which point I assume the restore will be terminated. This is not what I want and, more to the point, doesn't seem to be generally desirable. What have I misunderstood?

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BIT 1.4.1-1 new install: Why did I lose backups?
by LateJunction Dec. 6, 2023

Dec. 6, 2023

I am having difficulty in setting up backintime-qt to function as I expect; I would appreciate advice from experienced users. I’m running BIT 1.4.1-1 under Linux Mint 21.2 Cinnamon (based on Ubuntu Jammy), with Kernel 6.2.0-37. Hardware is 11th Gen Intel Core i5-11600, with 32 GiB. /Root and /Home are on separate NVME SSDs. Back up is to a 1TB 7200 rpm HDD. An nVidia 3060 GPU with 12 GiB of memory is installed. Yesterday I was able to set up and run BIT to give me backups under profiles 1 and 2 – i.e. in the Advanced section of the Manage profile s window I was able to define snapshots with the Advanced Profile entry set to 1 and then to 2, with different Includes and Excludes of my /Home folder. This was all with the Profile entry at the top of this windows set to ‘Main profile’ – which was the only option I had. After this I then added a profile (which I named) using the Add function and set up a 3rd, different set of includes and excludes. This seemed to execute as I expected. Today, when I looked at the backups, those for ‘Profile 1’ and the named profile that I set up yesterday are nowhere to be found on my system – why is that? This is worrying. The named profile which I had set up and which did run yesterday was large; it backed up the same data as my own, entirely manual backup method using FreeFileSync. I didn’t see the point of having both sets of backups, so I deleted the manually created one. Now I am, for a short window, entirely without this important data backed-up. This does not inspire confidence in BIT. I am further confused by the operation of BIT: I cannot tell (aside from looking at the log for a selected snapshot) which snapshot is the ‘Full’ backup and which are the incremental backups – they are all labelled as ‘snapshots’. I cannot understand how to create a new ‘full’ backup to replace an earlier ‘full’ backup. I need to do this because the data I am producing on my computer is important and complicated: accordingly I have been creating manual backups, using FreeFileSync, on average about every 20 minutes (or less) for about 15 hours a day, every day. If I don’t create a new ‘full’ backup with BIT at least daily I will end up with between 50 and hundreds of incremental backups in the worst case. Restoring such a backup archive is just impractical. What should I be doing differently? I have only just realised that my method of using FreeFileSync, as an incremental backup tool, essentially continually updates an original full backup, ‘on the fly’, so that a restore merely requires me to copy just 1 data set back to the original location. The weakness of this model is that it cannot handle the situation where increment ‘n-1’ is in fact preferable to increment ‘n’ : ‘n-1’ has been overwritten by ‘n’. Any comment? Finally, the backups that are running – accounting for about 44 GiB of data - have taken just over 4 hours to run. I can do a complete manual update of my whole system, including the files in /Root, totaling about 695 GiB, in about 30 minutes using FreeFileSync. What am I doing wrong that BIT takes so long, even with checksums, on this reasonably quick computer?

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Why doesn’t BIT make an incremental backup?
by LateJunction Dec. 6, 2023

Dec. 6, 2023

I created a ‘full’ backup against my most important folder tree – about 250 GiB, containing about 50K items. It took far longer than I expected, but did complete. I did not use checksum. I did specify that the folder tree was to be checked for changes every 12 minutes. I then made a single file change as a test – an important change to an important file. 4 hours later BIT had still not made an incremental backup, but rsync has been running, consuming about 1% of my reasonably fast CPU throughout that time. A simple running of FreeFileSync comparing the current folder tree with the full backup made 4 hours ago immediately shows the one file I changed, but BIT has not seen it – meaning that this change might be lost if I restore my ‘original’ folder tree now. This loss of data is not what I expected. Why does it happen? I also notice that BIT did not backup a file of type .kra~ (a Krita file). This too appears to be an example of data lost by BIT. Why did that happen?

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BIT 1.4.1-1: Ignorant new user: Where is Help file for backintime-qt?
by LateJunction Nov. 30, 2023

Nov. 30, 2023

I'm going to be asking a lot of dumb questions to help me make my install of BIT of greater value - so your patience will be most appreciated. The first is to ask where I can find the help file for backintime-qt and how would I install it on a Ubuntu-based distro? The response to clicking on the Help menu and then selecting Help (F1) is to be informed I'm looking at the Help pages for the command line version of backintime, not the GUI version (which I am using). Clearly, somehow, I have messed up the install. I installed BIT using my package manager (Synaptic).

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Translation: file(s) and/or folder(s)
by c.buhtz＠posteo.jp Nov. 10, 2023

Nov. 10, 2023

Hello, I have another question about improving an English source string. Please have a look at this source string and the two screenshots in the lower right. https://translate.codeberg.org/translate/backintime/common/en/?checksum=ef3… That question dialog appears when the user select "Restore to..." for example. Please focus on the first sentence beginning with "Do you really want to". It talks about "file(s)". But "folder(s)" are missing in that string. The user can restore "one/multiple folder(s) and/or one/multiple file(s)". Of course it looks wired having such a string in the UI. Technically it is possible to check the count of files and folders used in the list element in that dialog. But even this is a bit to much code just to present the correct string. So what can we do? Can we just ask: "Do you really wan to restore the following element(s) into new folder /foobar?" The "element(s)" could be easily replaced with the correct plural form using "ngettext()": ngettext('element', 'elements', len(paths)) There are some more strings using just "file(s)" in that dialog. I would like to here your opinions. Kind Christian

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Do we have sentences in the Auto-Remove dialog?
by c.buhtz＠posteo.jp Nov. 8, 2023

Nov. 8, 2023

Hello, I would like to ask for your opinions. Please see this Auto-Remove dialog of BIT and the elements starting with "Keep...". https://translate.codeberg.org/media/screenshots/bit_settings_auto-remove.p… Are these sentences? So they should have a full stop (dot) at the end? Am I right? Kind Christian

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RfC (dev process): When to close an fixed issue?
by BiT dev Nov. 5, 2023

Nov. 5, 2023

I have just created issue #1553 ([https://github.com/bit-team/backintime/issues/1553)](https://github.com/bit… for which we already have received an PR that fixes the issue. Which timing should we follow to close an issue? a) When the issue is fixed in the "dev" branch b) When the issue is fixed AND an contained in a release The timing may be of importance when users search for "open" issues. Currently we apply a) (mostly ;-)

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