Make user more aware of size of what they're backing up

[Michael Terry]

Some sort of boabab-like interface or just a list of the top 5 biggest folders that they're about to backup. Some way of pleasingly informing them that they are trying to backup 50 gigs of movies. Ideally an easy way to exclude such directories from the interface as well.

[Aaron Whitehouse (aaron-whitehouse)]

This shouldn't be too bad for an initial or manual backup (as the user will be in front of the computer and interacting with Deja Dup), but would be hard to do elegantly for automated, incremental backups.

My issue comes within the bug title, but is quite different to the solution proposed: I would like to see a warning of some kind if my incremental backup was going to be more than, say, 500 MB. Normally my incrementals are only about 10 MB, but occassionally I notice it is taking ages and then I have to Skip the backup and trawl through my hard drive looking for the cause. Nearly always, it is an iso image or huge file I have downloaded and put somewhere, but don't want to backup. I don't know if it would help anyone else, but a warning of "This incremental backup will be 900 MB", followed by a list of files ordered by size, would save me a lot of time. (Let me know if you would rather this were a separate bug number.) Perhaps the Boabab rings, or ordered list, could be displayed every initial and manual backup, but also for any incremental backup that exceeded a certain size.

One of the great features of DD is the simplicity and lack of settings, so I'm loathe to suggest adding another setting. Perhaps something clever could be done with percentages of the size of a full backup, or variation from the size of a "normal" incremental, rather than the user setting a figure. Alternatively, DD could assume that everything was fine and put up an additional non-invasive notification (like the one it does now with the "A backup is about to start" bubble that lets you postpone it) once the files to backup have been determined saying "Backing up 4 GB to Amazon S3" with a "click for details" -- then, if you clicked the bubble, you would get into a screen showing the files to be backed up, their sizes and have the ability to pause or stop the backup (while you dashed off to delete/move the iso).

[typo (gnomeuser8)]

Aaron Whitehouse, the "Downloads" directory could be generally not selected for backups. In most cases these files are available from the internet, if you need them again. Only the list of files will be lost. This way you can keep the interface simple and enhance functionality.

A boabab-like interface is a great idea, because I already use boabab to configure my deja-dup backup.

[Thomas Eriksson (scrizt)]

I have two related suggestions here:
1. Let users chose to exclude (and include?) individual files in addition to directories. (maybe also by patterns: *.o )
2. Make the backup tool auto-exclude large files and then have the user approve/disapprove of that exclusion in a backup-successful-BUT-dialog.

and lastly I second that the tool really should warn the user if it is about to send 200 gigs over the network.