Mailman 3 - Bit-dev - python.org

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

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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 like to be able to run the jobs at the bash command line prompt; even better would be to run them via a script. Where/how can I find the full command line that runs a snapshot defined in a profile? Thanks.

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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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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 'recent activity' page - but it wasn't to me. So perhaps one might draw a conclusion about the end-user effectiveness of this this mailing-list system by 'HyperKitty' - hmm ?

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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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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 code blocks." uses well-formed, grammatically correct, English but its meaning is completely beyond me. Where do I go to get this translated into something I might understand? More-over, if I must not use email, what other form of communication should I use to provide the requested information - this mailing list? But how would I be sure that the information goes to the person requesting it? I am further admonished by: "IT seems to me you don't carefully read what we write. We invest our spare time to help you here. So please take your time and read." This is an entirely reasonable and valid request, which I whole heartedly support (I used to have worldwide responsibility for managing the delivery of technical support for a computer system manufacturer 40 years ago). But it is somewhat unfair - I do read everything, when I am aware that it is available, but I do not always fully understand everything I am asked to do. The world of technology has moved on a bit from when I retired almost 30 years ago.

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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.

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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, 'full' backup and then restoring, in date/time order, the subsequent incremental backups. This will inevitably restore the deleted file, which I might not want. I cannot specify to BIT that it is to restore backups that were created only after the file deletion, else the majority of the files in the initial, 'full' backup will not be restored. So, how is file deletion handled?

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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 have compared every incremental backup version of this file with the original, using the diff command. No change is detected in any of the incremental backups. Why it BIT selecting just this one, unchanged, file in each incremental backup?

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