Re: Oddity around backup times...

[Colin Percival <cperciva@tarsnap.com>]

John Schofield wrote:
> I'm a new tarsnap user, backing up several directories on my laptop.
> 
> One in particular contains about 40 GB in about 7500 items. Tarsnap
> completes on this directory sometimes in 30 seconds, and sometimes it
> appears to take hours. Looking at activity monitor while it's taking
> hours, there's negligible network traffic, so I'm not sure what Tarsnap
> is doing if it's not uploading.

How often do files in this directory change?

If a file has the same {path, size, inode #, modification time} as the last
time Tarsnap saw it, Tarsnap will assume that it hasn't changed; but if any
of those values has changed, Tarsnap will read the entire file again in order
to figure out if and how the file was modified.

If you send Tarsnap a SIGINFO (BSD) or SIGUSR1 signal while it is creating an
archive, it will print which file it is working on and how far through it is,
which might help you figure out what's going on.

-- 
Colin Percival
Security Officer, FreeBSD | freebsd.org | The power to serve
Founder / author, Tarsnap | tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid