Mailman 3 December 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

2 3

RfC: New repo for collecting reusable issue support scripts and instructions?
by BiT dev Jan. 9, 2024

Jan. 9, 2024

I have a private list of bash and other scripts to support users that opened issues. Should we create a new repo (eg. named "support") to collect those things? It would help - to make it reusable for all of us - make issue support easier by just linking to a script or instructions

3 5

Request to test Qt6 migration
by c.buhtz＠posteo.jp Jan. 7, 2024

Jan. 7, 2024

Hello, I am working on migration of BIT from Qt5 to Qt6 because the support for version 5 ends this year. It would help a lot if you could test this version for bugs related to the migration. Play around with BIT, try to open the windows and dialog. But don't do this on your productive machine. Use a test machine or virtual environment. Clone the specific branch from my BIT fork: $ git clone --branch qt6migration https://github.com/buhtz/backintime.git Follow the install … [View More]

2 3

Working "vagrantfile" for Opensuse Tumbleweed?
by BiT dev Dec. 25, 2023

Dec. 25, 2023

Hi, I am trying to reproduce https://github.com/bit-team/backintime/issues/1580 but could not setup a VM via vagrant (mainly: no ready-to-use Gnome-Desktop available at vagrant and gnome segfaults after manual installation via terminal). Could someone with a working "vagrantfile" provide it here please? THX a lot

2 4

New User Question: Running BiT Snapshots via Command Line/Script
by Tim Evans Dec. 12, 2023

Dec. 12, 2023

I have just set up Backintime here, have set up some profiles, and am running snapshot jobs from the GUI; they seem to work fine. Running on a laptop (Fedora 39) with snapshots directed to an NFS-mounted Network Stoarage Applicance (NAS). I do not wish to add an external disk to the laptop, for laptop portability reasons. The laptop is (1) not always turned on and (2) not always at home where the NAS is available, so I need to run the jobs manually and can't use cron jobs. Ideally, I'd … [View More]

3 4

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 … [View More]

5 5

Responses to my requests to this mailing list
by Tony Hamilton Dec. 7, 2023

Dec. 7, 2023

I have learned in the last 30 minutes or so that there are responses to my requests to this mailing list. The page I had been solely reliant upon, showing the latest post, does not allow me to see any of these responses, so I had concluded - with disappointment - that there were none. I now know better and apologise for having given the impression that I was ignoring advice I had previously been given. Perhaps it is self-evident to everybody else that I should have been referring to the '… [View More]

2 2

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 … [View More]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? [View Less]

3 2

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 … [View More]

4 3

How to respond to an email request from aBIT developer without using email?
by Tony Hamilton Dec. 6, 2023

Dec. 6, 2023

In response to a bug report I submitted (concerning BIT repeatedly snap shotting an unchanged file) I received an email from Christian Buhtz: "Please do not answer via mail but use the formatting options of Microsoft GitHub using code blocks. This makes it much easier for us to read your terminal output." OK, I understand the request and accept my mistake - I'm not an expert in anything. But now I am in deeper trouble: the expression "...use the formatting options of Microsoft GitHub using … [View More]

2 1

What is the meaning of the leading 11 charcaters in each line of the Last Log View ?
by LateJunction Dec. 6, 2023

Dec. 6, 2023

For example, the leading 11 characters in a number of my BIT snapshot logs are: cf...p..... Where is the meaning of these characters defined/explained? I can't se any information in the help file, the user documentation of the FAQs.

4 3

File deletions : how does BIT handle them?
by LateJunction Dec. 6, 2023

Dec. 6, 2023

A significant number of the folders which are 'included' in one of my BIT profiles contain files of which some might be deleted after the first 'full' snapshot is taken. Examining the contents of the files created by BIT within any snapshot, I do not immediately see how BIT defines a file as having been deleted since the previous snapshot. So what prevents BIT restoring a file which has validly been deleted since the previous snapshot? Any restore operation must start with restoring the first,… [View More]

3 2

Why does BIT make incremental backups containing files which have not changed?
by LateJunction Dec. 3, 2023

Dec. 3, 2023

One of the profiles I have created backs-up a folder whose contents are important and which are subject to a lot of changes. I set the backup interval in the profile schedule to be 30 minutes. Unusually there have been no changes in this folder in the last 24 hours, but BIT has created an incremental backup, on schedule, since then which contains just a single file - the same file every time. It is not a file I can change because it is password protected and I do not have the password. I … [View More]

1 0

Modification of a profile: how does BIT handle this?
by LateJunction Dec. 2, 2023

Dec. 2, 2023

If I edit a profile - particularly if I change the specification of Includes and/or Excludes, after BIT has created the first, full, backup, how does BIT decide how to change the list of files it will handle in subsequent incremental backups? Surely a restore process will end up creating a restored set of files which differ to the original - won't it ? So, should a change in the profile require another full backup? If so, how many of the existing backup snapshots (full plus incremental) be deleted ?

1 0