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Timbo

Member

Registered: 2019-01-23

Posts: 12

Emailed report improvements

After getting email reports working, I was a little confused by the way the report displays the data.

1. Size is listed as "(Gb)", but this should be "(GB)" or "(GiB)". Bytes, not bits.

2. Under the column "Stop", there are entries for "Off yet".  "yet" makes no sense. Is that supposed to be "yes"? Also, I would have went with "Stopped" as a past tense event, but that's minor.

3. The speed is listed as "Speed (mb/s)".  It doesn't appear that it is "mb/s" and more likely "MB/s". In addition, you represent the data like 88/616, which means you're saying "88mb/616s", which is outright wrong. I'm guessing this is supposed to be a write/read indicator, but its not, its confusing. These numbers vary quite a bit over 11 VM's, so it really isn't useful without knowing what is being displayed.

4. When it prints "The eldest folders were deleted to make room", the next line is blank and then it prints the path that was deleted. It would be better if the blank like was moved to after the path, so the message is together and visually separated from the next VM's being backed up. Just a minor cosmetic improvement to improve readability.

Best regards

admin

Administrator

Registered: 2017-04-21

Posts: 2,055

Re: Emailed report improvements

Thank you for your feedback.

1 - Giga bits per second are usually abbreviated as gbps and giga bit as gbit. GiB is a different unit measure: Gibibyte, which stands for Giga Binary Byte => 10 raised to the 30th power. Assuming that a "b" in lower case stands for bit and an upper case one stands for byte is not correct, we will buy that as an styling matter anyway and will disambiguate that in next versions.

2 - You are right, that "yet" is redundant and most probably meaningless, maybe "Off indeed" would have been a better bet, but we are forced to keep texts as short as possible, which is an additional constraint. You are a much better source of knowledge in this matters, so we'll take your advice into account.

3 - In regards to the capitalization of these acronyms. They have become words on their own, thus you will see them capitalized and in lower case too. We'll buy that as an styling issue.

The forward slash means something different inside of the cell, there it separates the real size of the data from the nominal size of the sparse disk. These two figures will be equal in case of thick disks. In case of the MB/s unit marker, it separates the dividend from the divisor.

4 - We'll try to arrange that a bit better, but the type of HTML that e-mail clients are able to interpret is rather limiting.

Timbo

Member

Registered: 2019-01-23

Posts: 12

Re: Emailed report improvements

Thank you for your feedback.

1 - Giga bits per second are usually abbreviated as gbps and giga bit as gbit. GiB is a different unit measure: Gibibyte, which stands for Giga Binary Byte => 10 raised to the 30th power. Assuming that a "b" in lower case stands for bit and an upper case one stands for byte is not correct, we will buy that as an styling matter anyway and will disambiguate that in next versions.

2 - You are right, that "yet" is redundant and most probably meaningless, maybe "Off indeed" would have been a better bet, but we are forced to keep texts as short as possible, which is an additional constraint. You are a much better source of knowledge in this matters, so we'll take your advice into account.

3 - In regards to the capitalization of these acronyms. They have become words on their own, thus you will see them capitalized and in lower case too. We'll buy that as an styling issue.

The forward slash means something different inside of the cell, there it separates the real size of the data from the nominal size of the sparse disk. These two figures will be equal in case of thick disks. In case of the MB/s unit marker, it separates the dividend from the divisor.

4 - We'll try to arrange that a bit better, but the type of HTML that e-mail clients are able to interpret is rather limiting.

1. No, virtually never. Lowercase "gbps" just isn't used, nor is "gbit".  I've been reading electronic component datasheets all week long, and they consistently used "GBits/MBits" and "GBytes/MBytes" when speaking in size.  Go look on any review site for testing storage. They consistently use "MB/s" for talking storage transfer speeds.

It IS very common for "B" to be bytes and "b" to be bits.  I'll just mention these two search results: https://www.wu.ece.ufl.edu/links/dataRa … Chart.html and https://kb.iu.edu/d/ackw. The later url says:

Note: The names and abbreviations for numbers of bytes are easily confused with the notations for bits. The abbreviations for numbers of bits use a lower-case "b" instead of an upper-case "B". Since one byte is made up of eight bits, this difference can be significant. For example, if a broadband Internet connection is advertised with a download speed of 3.0 Mbps, its speed is 3.0 megabits per second, or 0.375 megabytes per second (which would be abbreviated as 0.375 MBps). Bits and bit rates (bits over time, as in bits per second [bps]) are most commonly used to describe connection speeds, so pay particular attention when comparing Internet connection providers and services.

3. It is useful to know what speed the data actually transfers at to know whether a hard drive is performing as expected or poorly. I do not see any benefit or usefulness to know what the sparse size of the disk transferred at. Its a nonreal measurement and will vary depending on how much the VM is filled up, nothing to do with performance and no indicator of problem or not. It actually makes it harder to spot problems by putting two numbers into same column.  Only the actual data transferred over time is useful. Please remove the sparse calculation and just use the actual data transferred over time.

4. I see your point about the mail client and browser. I viewed it in Thunderbird and didn't look as nicely as when I saved it as html and opened it in a browser. Now I can see the sparse numbers are greyed vs black, so it is easier to differentiate.  Maybe at the very bottom of the email, you can say, "Best viewed in browser" or something.  I think people will be grateful for viewing it in full html rendering.

What does the "Start" column represent? It's just dashes in my reports.

Edit: Nevermind about the html message. I wanted to figure out why Thunderbird didn't display properly, and it was because it thought the email was junk. When I told it it wasn't, the coloured text appeared. I don't like the remote content from 33hops.com being included (why include advertising banner for an already paid product? Just include it in free version, please. Same for the stupid Twitter, Facebook and linkedin icons/links. It's a STATUS REPORT!!!), that seems to be why it was flagged as spam.

Last edited by Timbo (2019-02-03 00:15:34)