I'll start by acknowledging that is not a bug in backintime. If this is the 
wrong place to ask this question, please consider leaving a suggestion to where 
I should ask.

I've set up a Linux server to serve as a repository for remote backintime 
backups for several systems. I'm trying to create a report, for each system's 
backup, of the amount of disk space used for the latest snapshot (easy, I'll 
show the command below), and total disk space used for all the snapshots for 
that system.

To the disk space used for the latest snapshot (or any particular snapshot), 
there's no difficulty. For example:

/usr/bin/du -sx 
/pool/backup/backintime/mysystem.example.com/user/1/last_snapshot/backup/*

The problem comes when I want to see the total disk use for 
`mysystem.example.com`. This command gives the correct answer, as far as I can 
tell:

/usr/bin/du -sx /pool/backup/backintime/mysystem.example.com/

The problem is that while the answer appears to be correct, as the number of 
snapshots increases, the du command takes longer and longer to execute. For 
some of the backups with a large number of files, it takes hours for that one 
du command to execute.

My guess is that this has something to do with how du is handling the hard 
links in order to get that correct answer. Based on my fiddling around, it 
appears that du is visiting every snapshot directory and going through all of 
files it finds, even if there are only a few files that differ between 
snapshots.

The result appears to be that if that first `du` command takes ten minutes due 
to the number of files in the snapshot, the second `du` command takes ten 
minutes * the number of snapshots.

Is my guess correct? Or is this due to something else? Is there any work-around?

The purpose of this report I'm creating is to understand how much actual disk 
space is being used over time for backintime backups. If I found that new 
snapshots were taking up a lot of space, it would mean the system's user was 
refreshing a lot of large files in-between snapshots. I'd want to re-evaluate 
the frequency of their backups or how long backintime retained the snapshots.

AlmaLinux 9.5
backintime 1.3.2

I obtained backtime via the EPEL repository:
dnf install backintime-qt

Disk has:

# df -h /pool
Filesystem             Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/POOL-pool   17T  5.1T   11T  33% /pool

# df -hi /pool
Filesystem            Inodes IUsed IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/POOL-pool   262M   58M  205M   22% /pool

--
-- Bill

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