Back in time much slower than corresponding rsync command
After my hard drive crashed, I started a restore from my Back In Time archives, and after having let Back In Time run for around 12h, the backup was far from being complete (I would say no more than 5%).
Running the corresponding rsync command myself proved to be MUCH faster
rsync -rtDH --progress --links --no-p --no-g --no-o -R -v --chmod=ugo=rwX "/media/
sending incremental file list
Here are a couple of things that I've noticed that might really slow down the restore:
- When starting BIT (I'm using the gnome version), BIT seems to automatically compare the backed-up directories to the latest snapshot, which keeps the hard drive busy
- When starting a restore, the GTK log window that is displayed is flickering, apparently being constantly refreshed. I imagine that when doing a full restore with millions of files, a significant amount of time is spent drawing and refreshing the window content. It would be probably better to display the rsync command and then the last 1000 entries from the log.
- When restoring permissions (I did not get there for the full restore, but saw that when restoring sub folders individually), a "chmod" is called for each restored file -- which I imagine is done through a popen/subprocess. The result is that restoring permissions seems to take much more time (I would say 3 to 4 times) than restoring the actual files. Using system calls directly would probably greatly reduce the time.
In essence, I find Back In Time is amazing, but it does not seem to be able to do a full restore with Gb of data within a reasonable amount of time.
Are there some options that might speed up the process?
Thanks!
Question information
- Language:
- English Edit question
- Status:
- Answered
- Assignee:
- No assignee Edit question
- Last query:
- Last reply:
Can you help with this problem?
Provide an answer of your own, or ask Sébastien Pierre for more information if necessary.