BIT 1.4.1-1 new install: Why did I lose backups?
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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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Hello, I can not answer all your questions. Maybe my colleagues do have some ideas. Which filesystem do you use on the backup drive (the destination)? Sorry, I did not understand your description about how you lost a backup. Am 30.11.2023 15:10 schrieb LateJunction:
Yesterday I was able to set up and run BIT to give me backups under profiles 1 and 2
Did you used the BIT GUI to setup this profiles or did you created your config file with a text editor based on "backintime-config" man page?
I am aware that the docu of BIT is not clear about it. I will work on that. BIT is using "rsync" in the back and using its "hardlink feature". Technically each snapshot is a "full backup". BIT do not produce incremental backups. Using the hardlinks feature of rsync just makes it feel a bit like incremental. In short: Full copies are done for files that changed between two snapshots. Files that did not change are just linked using hardlinks and not copied. That is why the snapshots after the first one should be quite fast. There is a more detailed description in our FAQ: https://github.com/bit-team/backintime/blob/dev/FAQ.md#how-does-snapshots-wi... Kind Christian
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Hi Christian, I trust that by now you are aware that I did not know your (and all others') replies to my appends to the mailing list existed. That discovery has come as an embarrassing and regrettable shock to me this morning. Now, I imagine, everybody on this particular mailing list regards me as a useless old duffer, who doesn't read what people have spent their time to write, or who is just plain rude. So now I am going through al those apparently ignored replies to make my apologies. But it would be great if this mailing list system could bring those replies to my attention - ever!. Currently the only way I can find them is via the 'posting activity' option in my account profile. That can't be right, surely? Anyway, I think the explanation for the problem I reported and requested help on, in this thread, is quite simple: the user was dumb. Things have improved somewhat since then, so I regard this thread as closed. Thanks for you support.
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Hello, I can not answer all your questions. Maybe my colleagues do have some ideas. Which filesystem do you use on the backup drive (the destination)? Sorry, I did not understand your description about how you lost a backup. Am 30.11.2023 15:10 schrieb LateJunction:
Yesterday I was able to set up and run BIT to give me backups under profiles 1 and 2
Did you used the BIT GUI to setup this profiles or did you created your config file with a text editor based on "backintime-config" man page?
I am aware that the docu of BIT is not clear about it. I will work on that. BIT is using "rsync" in the back and using its "hardlink feature". Technically each snapshot is a "full backup". BIT do not produce incremental backups. Using the hardlinks feature of rsync just makes it feel a bit like incremental. In short: Full copies are done for files that changed between two snapshots. Files that did not change are just linked using hardlinks and not copied. That is why the snapshots after the first one should be quite fast. There is a more detailed description in our FAQ: https://github.com/bit-team/backintime/blob/dev/FAQ.md#how-does-snapshots-wi... Kind Christian
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Hi Christian, I trust that by now you are aware that I did not know your (and all others') replies to my appends to the mailing list existed. That discovery has come as an embarrassing and regrettable shock to me this morning. Now, I imagine, everybody on this particular mailing list regards me as a useless old duffer, who doesn't read what people have spent their time to write, or who is just plain rude. So now I am going through al those apparently ignored replies to make my apologies. But it would be great if this mailing list system could bring those replies to my attention - ever!. Currently the only way I can find them is via the 'posting activity' option in my account profile. That can't be right, surely? Anyway, I think the explanation for the problem I reported and requested help on, in this thread, is quite simple: the user was dumb. Things have improved somewhat since then, so I regard this thread as closed. Thanks for you support.
participants (3)
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c.buhtz@posteo.jp
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LateJunction
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Tony Hamilton