Monitor ongoing upload?

[jerry <jerry@tr2.com>]

OK,

   I started up a "real" tarsnap backup.  du -sb = 19 gigabytes.  Maybe 
I should have done some arithmetic
before starting.  At an upchuck-DSL speed of 85 kilobytes per second, 
that's 2.6 days.  Not to mention that it's probably longer than that, 
because of the significant value that tarsnap is adding to the process.

  I'm not sure exactly how much of the 19-gig I'm actually 
transferring, because there is a substantial excludes file.  Yeah, I 
could write a script to du -sb all the excludes, add them up and 
subtract from the total.  Maybe later.

  I do understand that I pay the time penalty only once, and subsequent 
backups will be more or less the difference.

  The real problem here is that I really shouldn't change the data set 
while backing it up, right?  I really can't afford to have this data sit 
without write access for multiple days.  Totally impossible.
If I copy a snapshot off to another device or tar file, and then 
tarsnap off of that, will the transfer-only-changes feature still work 
when I do subsequent tarsnaps of the original data?


                                            - Jerry Kaidor ( 
jerry@tr2.com )