Backintime usage and experince
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I am a translator!
On questions:
I have read https://backintime.readthedocs.io/ but I could not find any explanation of basic things in "Preferences" (all the names are my translations from French back to English, they may not match with original English names).
At the top, there is kind of drop down list with a single item "Main profile". Next to it, there is a button "Modify" that is greyed out, and further a button "Add to" (not sure why "to").
Below, there is "advanced options", with "host", "user" and "profile" (again) set to "1".
How are the "profiles" of the top supposed to be used? In which case? Same questions for "host", "user" and "profile".
On my experience:
I have used backintime with an external USB SSD with an ext4 filesystem.
When I start a backup, the status bar can show 0% progress for a long time while, for a new backup, if I go to the directory, I see several 10ths of GB were already written to the SSD according to "du -sh"
At some point, the status shows that there is progress and that more than 100 GB were sent but actually, "du -sh" on the whole archive of the SSD says that less than 50 GB were written.
I also had the case that 32 GB were written (out of more than 100 GB), the status bar of backintime says the backup is ongoing but no single file gets written and it seems no rsync process is running. The log shows no error at all. Apparently the backup I started silently died. After quitting backintime, starting it again and attempting to do the same backup, it deleted everything of the previous attempt and that attempt apparently worked.
Am I the only one to have that kind of experience with backintime? I guess I am not using backintime correctly but the documentation does not really describe the correct usage then.
I only used an rsync front end once, on a machine hosting an ftp server, which was by definition up most of the time. Probably Grsync. Back In Time feels somewhat convoluted in comparison.
You may find some answers there: https://github.com/bit-team/backintime/issues/1371. Apparently, you need to create a profile (the "main profile") before anything runs, by clicking on "Add" "OK" after defining your backup preferences. I eventually lost interest in BIT, but you can probably achieve better if you have time to dive into the docs: https://github.com/bit-team/backintime#readme.
Different profiles can be used for different backup scenarios. For each profile that exists you can have a totally different group of settings (where to backup, what to backup, how often, etc.)
The "Modify" button lets you change the name of the profile. The Main Profile cannot be renamed and so it is disabled there.
"Add To" may be a translation mistake - Mine says "Add". Clicking that button is how you add another profile.
If you'll notice, the host/user/profile values go to part of the backup path. If you're ever restoring without backintime you may appreciate using the hostname of the machine in question.
I have three profiles in total, for backing up to three different local drives. You can even set the mode to SSH and have backintime backup over the network to a different computer if you want. For each of the three profiles backintime has incremented the profile number by 1 each time.
I generally don't pay attention to the backintime progress. I've set it and forget it, with hourly backups happening. Each time I look, they're out there.
> Clicking that button is how you add another profile.
Right. The "OK" button saves any change you have made to existing profiles.
"du -sh" on the whole archive of the SSD
If by "whole archive" you mean the directory for the current snapshot, then du counts hard links to files that have not been modified since the previous backup. That is what Back In Time does in that case. I guess Back In Time first identifies those files and creates the hard links (which essentially do not take any space), when the progress bar stays at 0%, and then sends the new/modified files, when the progress bar advances.
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