"Restore" big snapshots: GUI not responsive and not verbose enough

[phwoo]

Summary

It seems that the reporting user tried to restore a big snapshot (complete home folder). The GUI kind of freezes and was not verbose about this process. So the user got the expression that nothing happens.

Original post

Selecting "Restore" or "Restore to" via the Qt GUI does not appear to do anything.

restore_.log shown when clicking "Show full log" is empty.

No IO to disk.

Installed via standard apt package on Linux Mint 22 (backintime-qt)

backintime_diagnostics.txt

[buhtz]

Hello phwoo,

Thank you for taking the time to report the bug and providing the details. I appreciate your feedback.

Can you please give some more details about what you have done to start the restore.
There are several locations in the GUI to activate restoring. Do you tried to restore a whole snapshot or just a file/folder?

Please see the projects background information to get an idea about our workflow and priorities:

• Maintenance status
• The team
• Strategy outline / Roadmap

Best regards,
Christian

[buhtz]

Hello howoo,

I need some feedback from you and answers to my questions. Otherwise I am not able to go further in analyzing this problem and need to close the issue.

Regards, Christian

[phwoo]

Hi Christian,

Apologies for the initial terseness of the bug report.

I tried to restore from a full snapshot of /home. I executed via the top menu bar: Restore > Restore, then selected /home under Backup folders.

The application then hung at either this screen:

...or with one more "status" message in the same window. "Indexing files", perhaps?

I've realised that a restore was actually happening in the background, but there was no feedback that this was going on. The only way I worked this out was an rsync process running in the background, using the drive that had the backup on it, and the gradual restoration of files.

I ended up running the restore via the command line application, rather than the GUI, as there was more verbose feedback. So I think if there was some more feedback provided to the GUI, especially in this initial situation, that would be a lot more intuitive.

All that being said, I think we can close this issue, if it could be taken as a general request for "more feedback".

Thanks very much for your patience.

[buhtz]

Thank you very much for your help full response.

It is a known general problem that the GUI is not respsonive and verbose enough. That is on our agenda.

Next time when you experience a problem like this you can show the current syslog/journal in a separate terminal window while BIT itself is running.
https://github.com/bit-team/backintime/blob/dev/FAQ.md#how-to-read-log-entries