Backups take a long time

Well it shouldn't. Could you send your log (BiT logs into the syslog, you
only have to send lines starting with backintime) -> it also shows the
actual commands that are issued
And you should not enable the scheduled per included folder!

Cheers,
Bart

2009/12/7 Rob Simmons <email address hidden>

> New question #93232 on Back In Time:
> https://answers.launchpad.net/backintime/+question/93232
>
> I have previously been backing up to an external USB drive, using a simple
> rsync script. I have now acquired a NAS drive and decided to use BiT
> because it offered an easy way to do more sophisticated backups, in
> particular to have one or two previous versions available.
>
> My previous backups, once the first one was done (of about 260GB total),
> used to take some 3 minutes to complete, using a script something like:
> rsync -av --delete /home/ /media/backup/home
> rsync -av --delete /boot/ /media/backup/boot
> etc
>
> Naturally the first backup to the NAS drive took many hours, but subsequent
> ones ought to be vastly quicker. Given that the NAS drive write speed is
> about half that of the USB drive (on large files, according to actual tests
> on a gigabit network with jumbo frames), I would expect backup times in the
> order of 6 minutes. However, BiT seems to spend a very long time comparing
> with previous backups, then generating hard links and so on. After half an
> hour it still has not got started on the actual backup. I cannot see the
> actual script BiT generates - and I stress I am not a programmer - but I
> wonder why the backup takes so much longer than the rsync script when as far
> as I can tell, it uses essentially the same command.
>
> --
> You received this question notification because you are an answer
> contact for Back In Time.
>

Thanks Bart - that is encouraging.

The last backup I attempted I had to abandon after 3 hours, because the status message said it was still comparing with the previous backup. The lines it generated in the syslog are:

Dec 7 20:32:12 linux-svr1 backintime (robin): INFO: Lock
Dec 7 20:32:12 linux-svr1 backintime (robin): INFO: Include folders: ['/boot', '/etc', '/home', '/var/spool/mail', '/root']
Dec 7 20:32:12 linux-svr1 backintime (robin): INFO: Ignore folders: []
Dec 7 20:32:12 linux-svr1 backintime (robin): INFO: Last snapshots: {}
Dec 7 20:32:12 linux-svr1 backintime (robin): INFO: [KDE4Plugin.Systray.run]
Dec 7 20:32:12 linux-svr1 backintime (robin): INFO: Compare with old snapshot: 20091121-175321
Dec 7 20:32:12 linux-svr1 backintime (robin): INFO: [KDE4Plugin.Systray.run] begin loop

I have two previous snapshots on the NAS drive.

Please excuse my ignorance, but I do not understand the last sentence in your previous reply.

Kind regards,
Rob

There is a bug in kde4Plugin. The plugin was rewrite for the next version.

Thanks Dan, I should have checked the bug list (Bug No. 451268 I assume). It appears some success may be achieved by initiating BiT from a console. For interest, I tried a backup this way last night. It took just over 3 hours but did complete.

Kind regards,
Rob

Hi,
I am using an external hardrive formatted as ext3 to do my backups. I am using the root launcher created by backintime to do a back of my root directory. The first back up took about 45 minutes to complete. Subsequent backups should not take as long since it is only supposed to back up the deltas. I have tried the back up 3 times now and every back up takes about 45 minutes!
Its hard to say reliably which step takes the longest. Sometimes creating hard links takes a long time....sometimes its the permissions step that takes the longest.
So my question is:
Is it normal for backups to take this long? What can i do to improve the performance?
I am using ubuntu 12.04 LTS.
-rahul

I just waned to mention one more thing. I scanned my external harddrive to see the size of each backup.
1st backup was 7.1GB
2ND backup was 1.2GB
3rd backup for 512MB

So if it is doing incremental backups currently then why are they taking so long?
-Rahul

Maybe because there are many files.
The backup looks incremental because it use hard-links between snapshots but first it has to check each file if it is changed.

Regards,
Dan