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

[Graham Percival <gperciva@tarsnap.com>]

On Sun, Nov 11, 2018 at 06:02:31PM -0800, Craig Hartnett wrote:
> 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.

I'm pretty certain that your first upload will be limited by your upload speed.

85 GB is a lot, and cable ISPs often have a lower upload speed than download.
If your Shaw cable offers 150 kb/s of sustained upload, then I think it
will take 6.5 days.  Let's do this in MB:
  85000 MB / 0.150 MB/s = 566667 seconds
  566667 seconds / 60 s/m / 60 m/h = 157.4 hours

If you have sustained upload of 300 kb/s, that would only be 78.7 hours, or 3
days.  Which, come to think of it, looks close to the time you estimated.

(Also, note that some ISPs offer a higher "burst" upload rate, but throttle it
down to a lower level if lasts for longer than some amount of time.)

> 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.

Right.  I've been working on displaying more info (if requested by the user),
but nothing's made it in yet.

Cheers,
- Graham