Feature request: Dry Run

[Germar]

It would be great to have a dry run option. It would help to see what files would be realy included. I'd prevent adding huge files by surprise like virtual machines images, iso and movies.

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Imported from Launchpad using lp2gh.

• date created: 2014-03-13T01:37:44Z
• owner: colin-brosseau
• the launchpad url was https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1291710

[bugspencor]

I'd like to see that too. It happens quite often that some big files end up unintentionally in the backup. Is there some other way (e.g. rsync commandline) to check in advance which new files would be backupped?

[colinl]

That would indeed be a very useful feature.

[ChrisK5]

Hallo,

yes, it would be nice to have such a feature implemented into Back In Time, but just to let people like us know, people who searched for such an option, this feature is not necessarily needed.

You can perform a dry run by simply adding the option --dry-run to "Settings->Expert Options->Paste additional options to rsync".

This will perform the dry run we were looking for and write it into a log file, if you have chosen a log option. Back in Time / rsync will not copy any file, but maybe it will still create everything that it always creates, like the symlink and maybe the other data or files. Maybe the "old" symlink gets deleted because of that. So if you perform a dry run like this, you maybe should make a copy of the additional files that Back In Time creates beside the actual backup files. I say maybe, because I do not know for sure how Back in Time will act in the same Profile. That's because I tested the dry run with an separate profile to a separate folder, but with a copy of the additional files to restore them if needed, one should be fine to try a dry run to the same profile, I guess.

Thanks to all members of the bit-team for this nice software. I like!

Kind regards Chris

[emtiu]

Information from #249: a Dry Run would also help identify permission errors before starting a lengthy backup/transfer operation.

[buhtz]

Note: I got the hint that LuckyBackup (also using rsync) do have such a "simulation" feature.

[aryoda]

I think with rsync --dry-run plus a new BiT command line argument --dry-run plus a "Take a snapshot (dry run)" button this could be implemented quite easily.

I would use a signal file in the created snapshot folder (eg. is_dry_run_result_only.txt) to

1. capture and persist the dry run result log "as usual" without changing the whole back-end logic
2. allow the GUI to show a "dry run indicator" in the snapshots list
3. prevent restoring from a dry-run result
4. let the "auto-remove" feature ignore the dry run "snapshot" folder

Any more obstacles that we could face implementing this?

[buhtz]

Sounds like a f***ing awesome solution!