Permanent icon and pause feature

[yesdrs13]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Whenever I do intensive video editing, I have to go into timeshift and turn off all scheduled backups. If the schedules are on and a backup runs during an edit, it interrupts the edit somewhat and the quality is not as great at times. It's a little annoying to turn off the schedules all the time and, sometimes, when I'm done editing, I forget to turn them back on.

Describe the solution you'd like
It would be great to have a permanent icon in the app bar that you could see the status of timeshift and to have a few "pause" options you can click on that would pause for a few set length of times (1, 2, 4, 8 hours) and one option to pause indefinitely until the user is ready to resume the backup schedule in which the user will have a "un-pause" option to turn off any pause. After the paused time has expired, timeshift would automatically turn back on the schedules again.

Describe alternatives you've considered
N/A

Additional context
N/A

[MarkMoretto]

Yes. Or, a pop-up notification when it starts running (so, not necessarily permanent).

Had an interview basically stop because my PC froze when this started running and bogged down some resources.

[yesdrs13]

In Linux Mint Cinnamon 21.3, I do get a "pop-up" when it runs and disappears when completed, but no option to "pause" it. When you hover over the icon that pops up, it states something like "Timeshift in Progress" or "Backup in progress" or something similar to that extent.

[MarkMoretto]

Hol up. How do I get a pop-up to appear?

I'm on MX Linux (Debian 12), if that helps.

if there is a pop-up, I agree that a Pause option would be great. Full support of that.

[yesdrs13]

Mark, I'm sorry. I only use Linux Mint and not sure of other distros. I know in Linux Mint Cinnamon 20.3, there was no "pop-up", but when I upgraded to LMC 21.1 and higher, the pop-ups showed. I think the devs for LM integrated a routine to do this starting with LM 21. 🙂 In LMC, there is an applet called "Timeshift Spy" - by nicog60, that may help rectify a pop-up issue. You can check it out at Timeshift Spy. Hopefully, MX Linux allows applets.

[yesdrs13]

Mark, wanted to show you on my screen what pops up when Timeshift starts to backup. When 2 cogs show up, Timeshift is processing a backup. When it's done the backup, the cogs disappear. This is not an applet, but directly from Timeshift.

[MarkMoretto]

@yesdrs13 Nice! Thanks.

That's crispy-clean desktop!

Anyway, I was initially going to ask about which environment you're on (Cinnamon, MATE, xfce) since I'm on KDE, but I think I have to adjust my notification settings since i don't see the bell (icon on the left on the right-side of your task manager bar), so that might fix one thing. I'll check back if not.

[yesdrs13]

Hey Mark, it's the Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition 21.3 I'm using. With the screen... I'm more organized on my computer than my filing cabinet! LOL

[yesdrs13]

Mark, I was curious about MX Linux and made additional partitions and installed the XFCE (ahs) and the KDE versions. On the XFCE, I did try out Timeshift on it and nope! No pop up at all. I haven't tried on KDE yet, but when I do, I'll let you know the outcome. By the way, I've never heard of MX Linux before and thought I'd give it a shot. It's not bad, just a few things that are "quirky", but there were some "work-arounds" I found already.

[0x6A7232]

+1 on pause option. Workaround as mentioned in the OP is turning off all backups that may occur within the desired pause timeframe. You may also be able to use something like the I/O rate limit feature (rsync --bwlimit flag) requested in #441 if that gets implemented (should be able to configure a rate that reduces I/O use enough to allow background backups to occur instead of causing problems).

[ygerlach]

I guess an option to "pause new backups until computer is restarted" or "pause new backups for x hours" should be quite easy to implement. I would just create a flag in the timeshift.json file, that blocks until a given timestamp or the boot_id (from /proc/sys/kernel/random/boot_id) was changed.

I think "pause currently running rsync backup" would also be quite interessing. I think a SIGSTOP and SIGCONT to the AsyncTask should be enough 🤔
The problem might be, that the timeshift showing the gui might not be the same instance creating the backup.

[mscheifer]

I've discovered a silly workaround for this. It seems that on my system if the Timeshift GUI is open then the cron job won't run. So just opening the GUI serves to pause jobs as long as it's open. (I don't think it would work if the backup has already started though). This might not be the same on every system. I'm on Mint 22.2 for reference.

Just opening the Timeshift GUI is potentially a temporary workaround.

[0x6A7232]

I see a suggestion that could be added as a toggle (maybe on by default so newbies don't get hit by it, but highly visible in case power users don't want it) to add / use ionice to the timeshift-* rsync cron job: ionice -c 3 ... -- this makes the backup job run as an idle task, which, honestly, it should be by most people's defaults, right? Unless it's an ondemand task, but even then it would be nice to have the ability to launch it as idle priority.

Thoughts?

[ygerlach]

use ionice

inside timeshift are still code snippets for using ionice (example: RsyncTask.vala). I dont know why it was removed 9 years ago. Maybe there was a good reason?

But if ionice is available (we should check that, a snapshot does not fail because of a missing ionice binary) i think we can use it again for scripted snapshots.

Maybe we can just do the required syscalls ourselfs and dont need to depend on external binarys for such a simple problem. But i dont know how ionicing works, so i have to investigate.

EDIT:
Its just a simple syscall.

ionice only calls syscall(SYS_ioprio_set, ...)

More details can be found in man 2 ioprio_set. I think instead of using the shell command and relying on it, its better to use the syscall directly.