Make user more aware of size of what they're backing up
Bug #307193 reported by
Michael Terry
This bug affects 9 people
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Déjà Dup |
Confirmed
|
Wishlist
|
Unassigned |
Bug Description
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.
Changed in deja-dup: | |
importance: | Undecided → Wishlist |
status: | New → Confirmed |
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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).