Based on my personal experience and what I see from others, it seems that the current ClientTimeout parameter is too generic to be all that useful with some people at times finding it too short and at other times too long.
Given the vagaries of Windows/cygwin/rsync, I find that sometimes BackupPC for the WinXP machines just hangs for hours until the dump is killed or a timeout is reached (after 20 hours according to the 72000 default). Here are some quick thoughts on what might be better... Directionally, the following intuition should apply: - If backup is making "progress" above a certain minimum "threshold" then don't timeout (unless really long) - If "progress" has stopped (or never started), then timeout after a certain wait period Specifically, it seems to me that we should distinguish (at least) among the following situations for long dump/restore times 1. Large backups/slow links - here we may want to scale the timeout proportionately to the estimated size of the backup and inversely proportional to the link speed. The backup size can either be given by the user (or default) or determined based on history or based on some estimate (e.g., size of filelist and moving average size of files in filelist) The link speed can either be tested at the start of the dump or adjusted dynamically based on file transfer speed. 2. Disconnected PC or newly degraded link speed - here it would be nice to have a separate "timeout" parameter and to allow for various responses to this scenarios which occur frequently with laptops and wireless connections 3. Rebooted PC - in this case it may depend on the backup method. For 'rsync' you might as well stop (and/or restart). For smb and tar you may be able to continue 4. Hung backup - here you want to stop if no "activity" (e.g., no information) is being transferred for a certain number of seconds even though the network link is up. Jump some thoughts... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ SF.Net email is Sponsored by MIX09, March 18-20, 2009 in Las Vegas, Nevada. The future of the web can't happen without you. Join us at MIX09 to help pave the way to the Next Web now. Learn more and register at http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;208669438;13503038;i?http://2009.visitmix.com/ _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list [email protected] List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
