Re: Verbose mode that prints added/modified files?

[Daniel Staal <DStaal@usa.net>]

--As of April 4, 2011 7:16:39 AM -0700, Colin Percival is alleged to have 
said:

> New files isn't possible: Tarsnap's deduplication works on an archive set
> wide basis, and the tar headers are bundled together to create more
> blocks, so there's no way to identify is a file is new or not.  (And how
> exactly do you define "new"?  What if a file is renamed and thus has a
> new path but all the contents is old?)
>
> Updated files is difficult, but theoretically possible.  You'd need to
> decide what to do with file fragments, though -- if Tarsnap has a small
> amount left over in a file which isn't worth storing as a block by itself,
> Tarsnap will bundle it together with other small fragments; so you could
> have a small part of a file being stored again even though the file hadn't
> changed.

--As for the rest, it is mine.

I have a semi-related request, and which would probably be easier...  (Or, 
depending on how you look at it, a completely unrelated request which would 
probably be easier.  ;) )

Could we have a switch that prints the progress in terms of *numbers* of 
files processed?  Something like:

   Processing file: x of y

(Or even a progress bar if you want to get fancy.)

I don't really care if it counts files that aren't going to get backed up, 
as long as they are in the directory tree.  (I don't even care if it counts 
hardlinks or aliases 'correctly'.)  But on super-long backups it'd be nice 
to have some idea of how much had been looked at, and how much tarsnap 
still had to go through.  The normal verbose output can be used, but you 
have to know the tree-transversal algorithm, and it spews huge amounts of 
text to the screen.  I kinda envision this as an update-in-place type of 
progress counter, although even if it didn't it'd be useful.

Daniel T. Staal

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