Re: Confusion about including and excluding files in tarsnap.conf versus the command line

[Craig Hartnett <craig@1811.spamslip.com>]

Hi Graham,


On Thu, 2018-11-08 at 18:07 -0800, Graham Percival wrote:
> Welcome!

Thanks, and thanks for your reply.


> Careful there!  "--exclude" only accepts a single value.

OK, that was clear in the config file, but not in the man page.


>       "tarsnap -c -f foo" doesn't work, even if we have an "include bar"
>       in the config file).

Yes, I noticed.


> Please delete the "include" lines, then use this command-line:
>   /usr/local/bin/tarsnap -c \
>  	-f "$(uname -n)-$(date +%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M-%S)" \
>         /media/USER/PATH		\
>         /home/USER			\
>         /etc				\
>         /opt

OK, thanks, that worked.


> For more information, please see:
> http://www.tarsnap.com/selecting-files.html
> including the warnings about trying it with --dry-run before doing a real
> backup.  I think that in your case, you don't need "include" at all.

Yup, I did read that page. Thanks. I did a dry run with your new command
above, including with the verbose parameter, and was happy with the
paths that were included.

But I have to ask now, and it's something I think would be very useful
to include on the "Getting started" page, how long should the first
back-up take? I realise that's asking how long is a piece of string, but
my first back-up has been going for a little over 28 hours now.
According to my dry run I should have about 85 GB of compressed data to
upload. I'm on a (Shaw) cable connection ... not their fastest, but I
suspect the connection isn't the bottleneck.

Interrupting the process with "killall -SIGUSR1 tarsnap" shows me that
there is progress, but I have no idea if I'm 10% in or 90% in. The
activity in my account shows that I've been charged most recently for
about 31 GB of storage, so that seems to suggest that after 28 hours I
am only about 36% done (21/85). That means this back-up will take until
Wednesday morning!

Am I right? Probably wouldn't have changed my course of action, to be
honest (except that I might have started the back-up on Friday
afternoon), but would have been useful to know up front.


Craig