#14 Accurate progress bar / ETA by doing a dry run first

[ForceU]

It would be great to implement a setting to do a dry run first before doing the actual run to find out how many bytes will be transferred. This size can then be used for the progress bar and a correct ETA.

As I use Grsync for folders with a lot of small files, every run takes about 1 hour if a lot was changed. The progress bar is always at around 98% and the ETA at about 8 seconds. The problem could be solved by implementing this feature.

[Jean-Sebastien Guay]

Hello,

I agree that anything that could be done to improve the progress display and ETA would be appreciated. The suggestion above sounds like one good way to accomplish this, but any way that would not significantly affect total run time would be great. Also, rsync --progress shows the speed (MB/s), which would be nice to see on grsync's progress display as well.

Maybe a summary of stats at the end would be interesting too (total time, average speed).

And if anything at all is possible, then maybe a progress display similar to Windows 10+ file copy display, which shows a progress bar with a graph of speed over time, would be awesome.

The horizontal is progress (light green filling up with progress percentage), the dark green graph is current speed over time, and the black line is average speed.

(story time)
I just restored some large backups to my NAS, one was 4TB and the other 5TB.
For the 4TB one, there were a lot of small files and a few very large ones. The progress seemed to go up "normally" i.e. at a speed I would expect for a USB 3.1 (5gbps) transfer, but it got to 98% and then spent over 5 hours on that remaining 2%.
For the 5TB one, that one is mainly movies and TV series. So about half the files are 300-500MB in size, the other half are a few GB. I would expect a progress bar based on number of files to be relatively accurate if we consider an average size around 1GB for each file. But here it went quickly (after about 2h) to 75%, and now after another 2h it's at about 80%.

So the idea of getting more accurate progress + ETA, as well as keeping an eye on speed (to know if I'm using the most efficient transfer method, say I plugged into a USB 2 port instead of USB 3 by mistake I would like to know...) would be great.

Thanks in advance!

J-S

[Piero Orsoni]

Hello,
Thanks for your post.
The main problem about progress display is that it's computed by rsync itself, and grsync is just displaying the rsync output graphically.
I would need to fully reimplement the progress calculations in grsync and use that instead of rsync's, but that would make little sense, cause it would be much better to do the same job on the rsync code instead, so everyone would enjoy it, not just grsync users.
I would, first of all, suggest to direct all progress related questions and suggestions to a rsync forum, while keeping the pure GUI ones here for me to implement.
Thanks again and have a great day!