Improved file size sort in Explore View

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Impulse
Posts: 1
Joined: Tue Mar 01, 2011 5:46 am

Improved file size sort in Explore View

Post by Impulse »

Hi there --

I have been using Backup4All for a few years and am very pleased with its capabilities and continued improvement.

My total backup is ~ 300 GB to an offsite NAS via SFTP, encrypted and split across 5 different "jobs", enabling me to define different characteristics depending on the type of files, frequency of updates, etc. B4A has handled this large backup job really nicely for my needs.

The one area where I find the program limiting is in the way it reports the file tree in the Explore View. When I am launching a new incremental backup job, it is often the case that I find the incremental backup size is estimated to be much larger than I anticipated. When this happens, it is usually because I have accidentally left some large temporary files in the backup source directories, which I didn't intend to backup. eg. let's assume that I have a 300MB file in a directory somewhere that I meant to delete.

Unfortunately, it is very difficult to locate these large files in the tree because the File Size sort is reset at each directory in the overall tree view. If I click on Expand All, it is nearly impossible to find where these incorrectly-backed up files are because my backup job is 100s of thousands of files deep.

A perfect solution would be to add another column to this display (next to "Size") that reports the "Cumulative Size" of the directory tree (of files filtered for current backup) below each directory. For an example of this, please have a look at the freeware "treesize" utility. This would make it a very simple matter to scroll down the top-level directories and enable me to narrow down my search to the large unexpected files.

Hopefully, such a feature would not be too hard to integrate as I feel that it adds tremendous value for those who are working with very large backup sets.

Thanks,
Cal (from ImpulseAdventure.com)

Adrian (Softland)
Posts: 1914
Joined: Wed Dec 16, 2009 12:46 pm

Re: Improved file size sort in Explore View

Post by Adrian (Softland) »

Hi,

We added your feature request to our To-Do list.
Do you know you can monitor your backups remotely with Backup4all Monitor? You can read more here: https://www.backup4all.com/backup4all-monitor.html

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