bit-team
Should BIT inhibit suspend/idle mode by default?
Situation
While performing a backup, BIT does inhibit (stop) the power management and prevent the system going to sleep or hibernate. The problem might be that the user is not informed about it and do not notice that behavior. As one user described this can cause serious problems with laptops not going to expected hibernation mode when fold is closed.
Question
Is there a good reason to have this behavior as default?
Proposed solution
- By default disable that behavior.
- But offer it as an option.
- If possible warn the users about inhibited suspend in the GUI and systray if alive.
- Info (not warn!) the users via log entry.
Currently there is no evidence about how this behavior change can impact existing BIT instances. It might be a good idea to follow a regular deprecation-steps-approach, without an immediately change.
Related issues
- #599
- #714
- #1090
- https://debianforum.de/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1388202
Is there a good reason to have this behavior as default?
Scheduled backups might never be performed because the system goes to sleep before backup. IMHO this situation is more serious than a hot laptop.
Maybe keep it default but make more obvious via presenting this as an option (as checkbox widget). e.g. Inhibit power management while backup (checked by default).
Also move this option (and Disable backup on battery) to the Schedule section on the first Settings-Tab. Because there it is relevant.
EDIT: The two options mention are also relevant for removing backups. So the schedule section might not be the best place somehow.
Is there a good reason to have this behavior as default?
- rsync is incremental and I assume devices are powered multiple minutes at a time (otherwise they wouldn't have any change worth backuping anyway), eventually the backup should complete
- And interesting datapoint for this question is "How are other devices doing ?", and for instance an iPhone will bother the user only when it's been two weeks it wasn't able to run a backup (due to power level, or network level, or the device not being on, ...).
Scheduled backups might never be performed because the system goes to sleep before backup. IMHO this situation is more serious than a hot laptop.
Maybe here the issue is that upon wakeup, the underlying "backup tool" will exit != 0 (broken pipe, usb device went away and back, ...) and backintime wouldn't retry, so perhaps think about a default-retry-on-failure (after a sleep 30s) ? (note: i don't know extensively backintime, it may already do this)
Maybe keep it default but make more obvious via presenting this as an option (as checkbox widget). e.g.
Inhibit power management while backup(checked by default).
I'd be more inclined to not keep it by default on new installations, but for sure on existing ones yes. It would suck for someone to be in the cascading 0.1% of "oh shit situation" to find that in this ticket we thought it'd be good to change that behavior for any reason
