Handy SwiftBar Status Widget for Monitoring Long Restores 🚀

[Daniel Schnitterbaum]

Hi everyone,

First, a big thank you to Jay and this community for keeping GYB alive and awesome — I just completed setting up a large (~40 GB) .mbox restore and wanted to share a small tool that made the process way easy and fun to monitor.

I have vibe coded a SwiftBar menu bar plugin for macOS that:

• shows live progress %, messages/min, remaining count, and ETA

• keeps updating every 10 s by parsing the gyb-import.log

• has quick links to open, reveal, or tail the log

It’s minimal, clean, and perfect for running GYB jobs in the background while keeping an eye on the progress.

You can grab it here: GYBProgressAsciiBar.10s.py

Big thanks again to everyone here for the help and shared knowledge — couldn’t have pulled off such a smooth restore without this group!

Cheers,

Daniel

[Daniel Schnitterbaum]

How it works

• GYB’s output is redirected to a log file during backup or restore:

  nohup caffeinate -i /Users/you/bin/gyb/gyb \ --email "y...@gmail.com" \ --action restore-mbox \ --local-folder "/path/to/mboxes" \ --strip-labels \ > "$HOME/gyb-import.log" 2>&1 &
  

• The plugin tails that log every 10 seconds, calculates throughput and ETA, and updates the menu bar automatically.

Install

1. Download SwiftBar

2. Place the script in your SwiftBar plugins folder

3. Make it executable:

   chmod +x ~/Documents/SwiftBar/Plugins/GYBProgressAsciiBar.10s.py

4. (Optional) If your log isn’t at ~/gyb-import.log, set GYB_LOG in SwiftBar → Preferences → Environment Variables

5. Refresh SwiftBar, and you’re done.

Gist with code:

https://gist.github.com/aboocat/6cbd4ff42d007da7c84ee8f79632622e

This has made long-running restores easier to track without keeping Terminal in the foreground.
Thanks again to this group for all the shared knowledge and support!

—Daniel

 

[Chad Ramey]

Nice! Thank you for sharing!