UI and schedule

[Chucky2401]

Hi,
I love Backrest! I use it everywhere I can to manage my Restic repo for my game backup savegame made automatically with Playnite or to backup my 2 Raspberry Pi.

Here some ideas I have :

• First, when I manage my Playnite backup, the UI is slow. When I collapse everything, it's far better (I have more than 400 snapshots now, I had have close to 1000 at the beginning).
  I think it may be very useful to have an option to reduce everything. Even, an option in the settings to have everything reduced by default.

• Sometimes, I need to remove several snapshots, I need to do it one-by-one. I can script it, but sometimes I prefere to use the UI (laziness to code 😅). Maybe add checkboxes to select several snapshots and made a batch action?

• For scheduling option, I see some users ask for webhook, but I don't feel confidant with this solution. But, I use a lot MQTT (personnal or at job) but maybe it is not easy to implement for you, it's just an idea.

• To finish, I have my stats for my first Raspberry Pi unreadable now. I computed stats manually every day, even sevaral time per day to compare with my previous backup system, and now it's too hard to read the first stats that have been computed. Could you add something to clean old stats?

I would like to help you, but I don't know Go at all.

[garethgeorge]

Thanks, glad the project is working well for you :)

Interesting to hear about the performance issues -- backrest is definitely a bit optimistic about the performance of the client PC as it'll let you view a lot of entries at once. I think some sort of pagination in the tree view is an option here for very long feature requests but is fairly technically complicated -- this probably deserves it's own feature request.

Removing multiple snapshots is something you can do with Run Command today, but agreed it'd be a nice UI feature. I'll think a bit about what a good flow for bulk management of backups would look like.

Re: scheduling / scripting plans externally, backrest does provide a webhook for this which isn't documented but is likely to remain stable for the foreseeable future, more notes in #275 (comment) on this. The webhook is fundamentally the same as clicking "Backup Now" in the UI and will queue a new task each time it is triggered.

Re: stats, I see what you mean -- stats tasks can be seen in the full history but there's no way to delete them there. Please also file a bug report for this one, it's something I should take a look at.

[garethgeorge]

Very much a side note, but noticed that you're running a raspberry PI. Curious if you've had any of the issues reported in #541 ? I've had some startup issues with the newer arm builds reported, trying to figure out if it's limited to the raspberry pi zero.

[Chucky2401]

Interesting to hear about the performance issues -- backrest is definitely a bit optimistic about the performance of the client PC as it'll let you view a lot of entries at once. I think some sort of pagination in the tree view is an option here for very long feature requests but is fairly technically complicated -- this probably deserves it's own feature request.

I understand it can be complicated, don't worry, as I have a lot of snapshots I prefer to use the CLI than the UI, but for stats I prefer Backrest, my attempt to do stats isn't good.

Removing multiple snapshots is something you can do with Run Command today, but agreed it'd be a nice UI feature. I'll think a bit about what a good flow for bulk management of backups would look like.

Yes, as I said I can use a script, but sometimes I'm too lazy. But, to be honest, for my large Restic repo, I have some PowerShell script to do it easily already.

Re: scheduling / scripting plans externally, backrest does provide a webhook for this which isn't documented but is likely to remain stable for the foreseeable future, more notes in #275 (comment) on this. The webhook is fundamentally the same as clicking "Backup Now" in the UI and will queue a new task each time it is triggered.

I like this! I will give it a try and make some feedback if you want. But for sure, it's very intersting!

Re: stats, I see what you mean -- stats tasks can be seen in the full history but there's no way to delete them there. Please also file a bug report for this one, it's something I should take a look at.

I will. Maybe not a bug report, but an enhancement

Very much a side note, but noticed that you're running a raspberry PI. Curious if you've had any of the issues reported in #541 ? I've had some startup issues with the newer arm builds reported, trying to figure out if it's limited to the raspberry pi zero.

I have Backrest on a Windows 11, Raspberry Pi 3 B+ and 5. It works smoothly and I don't have any errors on it. I run it with Docker on my Pi by the way

Information for both hardware:

OS: Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm) aarch64
Host: Raspberry Pi 5 Model B Rev 1.0
Kernel: 6.6.51+rpt-rpi-2712
Docker version 27.3.1, build ce12230

OS: Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm) aarch64
Host: Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Rev 1.2
Kernel: 6.1.21-v8+
Docker version 27.3.1, build ce12230