Hi gang,
Hope everyone had a great Christmas, Hanukkah, or whatever you celebrate, and look forward to a good and prosperous new year.
One of my Christmas presents this year was an upgrade for my desktop. Since it had been 4 or 5 years, and I had accumulated a kind of frankenbox, I decided to do a "nuke and pave." (actually, I decided to downsize the drive and put more stuff on the file server)
So...I ran a full backup of the machine, rebuilt over the new year, and started restoring. The following are a few observations and suggestions for the next version of backuppc based on my experiences:
1. I would like to see better feedback of status of restores, similar to what we have with backups. It seems to me that there is very little logging of restores (unless I am looking in the wrong place). For instance, I started a restore of my home directory, and while I could see a limited amount of increase in the used in df, however, after running overnigth, it did not apparently complete...Since there are still things missing, including .ssh and several other config files. So there was no indication of the status of the backup. The only thing in the log file is:
2012-01-02 19:59:18 restore started below directory /home to host defiant but no indication if it completed. I had also queued other restores, and they did not complete either. Since I can't get any kind of indication, I am doing the restore to a tar file on the laptop and then scp'ing and restoring by hand.
I was thinking that perhaps a status bar color change in the hosts summary (we already have green for system backing up, yellow for no ping, gray for manual/disabled backups...perhaps blue for restore in progress?)
Perhaps a status of queued restores, a little more logging, maybe a flow indicator? I know I can use tcpdump, but perhaps backuppc could include a restore percentage indicator? The final suggestion would be to have a way to stop a restore, similar to the stop/dequeue backup button.
Thanks,
--b
