Hey admins,

First off, warm holiday wishes.  If you're whitting down the hours until
vacation, here's something to kill some time and might be useful to you
at some point.

It seems like I am always asked "How long is that going to take?"
especially when it comes to full backups or restores.  Users don't seem
to realize what a multi-faceted question that can be...  For restores, I
need to lookup how much data is stored on the server, subtract out how
much has already been restored, calculate time based on its restore rate
(that isn't always wire speed for many reasons,) and then do the time
math to say, "Yes, your restore should be done by 3:30."

I finally got the time to knock out a small javascript calculator to do
the heavy lifting for me.  Maybe it will be useful for you.

My Time-To-Transfer Calculator
http://www-dave.cs.uiuc.edu/timer.html

It's self-contained html/javascript so you can copy it locally if you
like, or bookmark it.  It works in Firefox and IE, I hope.  If you find
bugs, let me know.

Enjoy, and happy new year!

Dave