Size of Data Being Backed Up?

[John_44]

Hello Everyone,

Is there a way to check how much data is being written to tape during a backup. I am using fbackup. I get a e-mail telling me if the backup was successfull or not and I can look in /var/sam/log/br_index to see the files that are on the tape but I am interested in the amount of data, the total size written to tape. Any and all help would be appreciated. Many thanks in advance.

John

[Tim D Fulford · Accepted solution]

Yep

If you have galnce, then get the PID of the fbackup process, say 1234 use glance (files mode)
# glance -F
youll be asked the PID type in 1234

There is a column called offset, & one called filename, look at the row with your tape dev in it & the offset is how much it has backed up (bytes I think). This screen will periodically update giving you an idea how quickly it will back up.

I use it quite often to check on the progress on all types of backup

If you do not have glance I do not know of anything else that does this

Tim

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi John:

I don't think you can get anything other than the number of files backed-up. The utilization of the tape is dependent upon lots of factors -- compression; number of files; checkpoint frequency as specified in the 'config' file; and whether or not a file had to be retried during the backup process. A file that is changing during its copy will be retried and thus re-written. The "bad" copy is merely marked "bad".

...JRF...

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi John,

I can think of one fairly simple way to do this: Rather than having fbackup output directly to tape, you specify -f - to output to stdout. You then create a small C program which acts as a filter. Everything input goes straight to output but you count bytes and send that total to a specified file. Stdout would then write to tape. The c program is quite trivial. Bear in mind, that this will count the number of bytes of data supplied as tape input but will not (and cannot) state how much compressed data was written to tape.

Clay

[Victor_5]

Try this way:

fbackup -f device -i path | dd of=/dev/null obs=1024

fbackup writes the backup in the default output, dd picks up the data and writes it to /dev/null. dd then issues a message containing the number of records out in Kbytes.

For example, if dd says

2098404+0 records in
1049202+0 records out

That means 1049Kbytes of fbackup is being written.