emtiu
commented
2 years ago I'm merging Issues #237, #707 and #802 into this one. Here's a summary of the information contained there (as well as in #152, which is related but not a duplicate):
- In past versions (before 1.1.10), removing snapshots froze the GUI until the deletion was complete. This was reported in #152 and #487, and fixed with 0629361c16a053ab1baa26d607edca2943072fe8 and bc6d6bdf0309c94f7e19783a6d3f2d877a224074 by introducing: https://github.com/bit-team/backintime/blob/88d19d42e9128f60b8952a64ed1fff23bd28108f/qt/snapshotsdialog.py#L401
- Since then, snapshot deletion happens detached in the background, by spawning
find […] -exec chmod […]andrm […]commands
This new behavior led to other complaints in #707, #802 and this Issue:
- Manual snapshot deletion is not represented in the status bar or the system tray. It just "happens", and users have no way to be sure if and when the process is running, stuck or finished.
- The situation is a little different for smart remove, which at least gives a "Smart remove x/y" indicator in the status bar, spawned by (I think): https://github.com/bit-team/backintime/blob/88d19d42e9128f60b8952a64ed1fff23bd28108f/common/snapshots.py#L1378
- In https://github.com/bit-team/backintime/issues/802#issuecomment-332983410, @buhtzz described a workaround to observe snapshot deletion: "currently I only remove snapshots when I started BIT with --debug in the bash. Only on the bash I can see for sure if the remove-task is finished or not."
On the prospect of improving the situation and adding better status/progress indicators for snapshot deletion, longtime maintainer @Germar said:
- in https://github.com/bit-team/backintime/issues/707#issuecomment-281331073: "The status bar currently only shows status from running snapshots. It is a relict from old times which also doesn't work very well. I want to replace it, but first I need to implement a proper interprocess communication between snapshots, GUI, systray, ... related to #84"
- in https://github.com/bit-team/backintime/issues/802#issuecomment-333239634: "The current way of handling the background backup jobs from detached GUI is pain in the a**. I won't do the same for background delete job. The whole IPC need to be redesigned. Because this need to work without dbus it willl be quite a big project […]"
In summary, the current state of affairs is: Snapshot deletion happens detached in the background, and (in the case of manual snapshot deletion) isn't represented in the GUI in any way. The way in which the process of taking a snapshot is displayed in the status bar and system tray is (according to @Germar) not easily extended to deleting a snapshot. In his view, the inter-process communication (IPC) between the background processes, GUI and system tray needs a complete reworking.
aryoda
Slowly deleting many snapshots should display a progress indicator.
Currently (as of 1.2.1) I can only observe the snapshots slowly disappear in the list. At first I thought that no deleting was going on, until I noticed the disk load.