jshelton Posted August 30, 2003 Report Share Posted August 30, 2003 When conducting a backup, there is a progress bar for the whole progress, but no progress bar for the current backup set member. In cases like DVD or Disk backup sets, you have a reasonable idea of the remaining capacity. It would sure be nice to show it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jch Posted August 31, 2004 Report Share Posted August 31, 2004 I second this. I'm backing up to a Travan 10/20GB tape drive which involves a *lot* of switching during a full backup (spans 5 tapes, each taking about 5 hours to write). It would really *really* help to be able to see a Progress Bar *for the currently installed media* so that I would know roughly how long until I have to re-appear and switch tapes. Really! Hope this helps, .../j Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WRShaw Posted August 31, 2004 Report Share Posted August 31, 2004 I also think this would be a nice feature, but you cannot base it upon capacity. If your tape drive is streaming then it will take a known amount of time to use a tape and if it isn't streaming then that should be an item of concern. In the meantime, perhaps you can use this approach to your advantage. Determine how long it takes for your tape drive to go from BOT (begining of tape) to EOT (end of tape). That will be your change interval, by adding it to your current time you will have a good estimate of when you will need to return to change tapes. For example, when I used DAT tapes each one would take about 2 hours to write (regardless of the amount of data stored which varies by compression) so I knew that I would need to feed the machine some multiple of 2 hours later (depending on the number of available tape drives). An an example of loading a one tape drive system at 4:15pm would indicate that I'll be changing tapes a bit after 6:15pm. -Bill Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jch Posted September 1, 2004 Report Share Posted September 1, 2004 Quote: If your tape drive is streaming then it will take a known amount of time to use a tape and if it isn't streaming then that should be an item of concern. It's a Seagate STT20000A Travan 10/20GB which has 3 different read/write speeds that it automatically changes between, depending on data rate. Also add in the shoe-shining delays. The total time for a tape can range from 3 hours (with Veritas) to over 6 hours (with Retrospect). Hence the need for a rough *media-based* progress bar. .../j Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jch Posted September 1, 2004 Report Share Posted September 1, 2004 Quote: Determine how long it takes for your tape drive to go from BOT (begining of tape) to EOT (end of tape). That will be your change interval, by adding it to your current time you will have a good estimate of when you will need to return to change tapes. Another (perhaps more important) instance of when this isn't ideal is when you are *appending* to a media. Currently, you have no easy way of knowing whether the backup job is starting right near the end of the requested media. i.e. whether you'll need to change media after only a few hundred MB. I've been burned by this scenario many times. A media-centric progress bar *right in the Activity Monitor window* would make my life a *lot* easier. .../j Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.