Back In Time

Bit freezes when selecting one of several backup folders

Asked by Holger

Hi, I have Bit 1.0.7 (on my Ubuntu 12.04) installed since yesterday - using it for the first time. The first snapshot (1.6 Tb) worked seemingly. It is from one external Hd to another. I have six backup folders. Now, when I select one of them - (it happens always with the same - it has 125000 files and 194.7 Gb) Bit freezes. (That is the app window gets darkened and doesn't react.)

What can I do?

When I look into the the backup folder with nautilus everything seems ok. So I am not in a hurry for the moment, since at least one backup is there.

(What keeps me from re-installing Bit is the following: When I tried to do the the first snapshot, I had my power settings to stand-by after two hours inactivity. Nevertheless while running the backup the machine went to stand-by during the night. Next day the whole 600 or so Gb (out of 1.6Tb) that had already been backed up, had disappeared. So I concluded that Bit didn't seem to be able to resume.)

I like Bit for its simplicity and because I can browse the backup, unlike Deja'dup.

Edit: Only now did I notice that after some 15 minutes or so Bit resurfaces and I can browse the problem-folder from within Bit in the Now-view as well as the Snapshot-view. However, each time I select this or that other folder, it darkens again. Is that normal behaviour or should I worry? I mean - as long as Bit doesn't make any mistakes, I can live with that.

The problem with that one folder is - I guess - that the number of files is quite large, while its size is actually far smaller than the other folders.

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Germar
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Germar (germar) said : 		#1

Hi Holger,

first of all please update to latest version 1.0.34 from stable PPA. Your version 1.0.7 is quite outdated and there are couple bugs fixed already. Please run 'sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bit-team/stable; sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get upgrade' in Terminal.

When you said 125000 files do you mean there is one folder containing all those files or do you have subfolders which contain these files all together? In first case it might still freeze the GUI (at least the Gnome GUI) even with latest version because the Gnome GUI need to process all files, check for mime type and add icons by its own. KDE GUI and the upcoming Qt4 GUI in next version 1.1.0 will delegate this to the underlying framework which is lot faster.

Please make sure 'Continue on errors' in Options is activated to make sure BIT will resume broken snapshots. I'm not sure if this was available in 1.0.7

Regards,
Germar

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Holger (holger-schneider) said : 		#2

Hi Germar,

thanks alot for your super-fast response. First, I really wonder - I only installed Bit two days ago - how can it be an outdated version that I tormented my brand new Harddrive with for 20 hours!?

Should I keep the snapshot that I made with Bit 1.0.7? That is, will Bit check and fix the snapshot in case is has problems?

The many files are contained in something like 40000 folders, which are located in one entry-folder.

I updated to 1.0.34 - and will do the setting you recommend, as soon as Bit becomes responsive again.

Now, does that mean that I should switch to the KDE-version? (if that is possible at all.) I'm sorry - although ubuntu has been running on my pc for two years now (without reinstall!) I may still be lacking some basics as to administering the system.

Please also note that I edited my Question after your response, which I hadn't seen. If the freezing continues - which seems to be the case - with the new version, should I keep using Bit? That is, I can live with waiting a while for the GUI to become responsive again, as long as Bit does its job.

Thanks,
Holger

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Best Germar (germar) said : 		#3

No worries, your snapshots will be fine. The outdated version in Ubuntus repository has two main reasons. First of all is this a strategy of Ubuntu to keep the same version of most packages for one release all the time as long there are no security relevant bugs or other highly important reasons to update. And second the maintainer for BIT Debian/Ubuntu packages was inactive for some time. Next release 14.04 will have a current BIT version again.

40.000 folders is still quite much. But it shouldn't take 15min to show them. How did you connect your external drives? How are folders named? Any special characters?

Please don't try to install KDE GUI in Ubuntu with Unity DE. It will work but it will install lots of dependencies, too.

You can keep using BIT. This will not effect the snapshots integrity. The GUI is just a way to represent the snapshot to you in a nice way. It will not change anything on the snapshots. The main job to create snapshots is done in background with 'backintime --backup-job' command. You could try BIT 1.1.0 from https://code.launchpad.net/~bit-team/backintime/Qt4 to check out if it will work better. But please don't use this in production as it isn't fully tested yet.

Regards,
Germar

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Holger (holger-schneider) said : 		#4

I see.

Now, tree dir/ | tail -1 says
44408 directories, 79786 files
Yes there are Chinese file and folder names among them. I already saw some of them in the snapshot, looking healthy and well fed :) :), so I'm not worried.

The hd is connected with USB2, its supposed to do 480Mb/s, 7200rpm and 9ms stuff uhm time.
It takes 16:50 mins to display the snapshot and
Displaying the "now"-folder takes some 20 minutes but thats on a slightly (two years) older hard drive.

Now I'm so glad this works. Apart from playing games the sync/backup routines were the only reason I had to start windows for the last years.

I still wonder what happens if I remove the first snapshot from within Bit. The one that contains the actual files. What will happen to the newer snapshots, since they (mostly) only have links to the first snypshot? Sorry again for my ignorance...

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Holger (holger-schneider) said : 		#5

Thanks Germar, that solved my question.

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Germar (germar) said : 		#6

Can you please send me an example of these Chinese filenames? Maybe BIT is freezing because of this!? I would like to test this just in case.

You can always remove snapshots without harming the others. Please take a look at my answer #5 in Question 123486 to understand how hard-link snapshots and smartremove works.

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Germar (germar) said : 		#7

https://answers.launchpad.net/backintime/+question/123486