Hello again Martin,
How can I do a full restore from my rdiff-backup backup directory that
will reflect my home folder as it is now on my temporary laptop (and
as it is in my rdiff-backup backup dir but obviously split over the
first
backup plus increments).
The key thing to realize here is that rdiff-backup stores files as
just a regular mirror of your current filesystem. Thus, a full
restore of the current state of a directory is one of the easiest
things you can do with rdiff-backup - it's just a straight copy of
the files in the rdiff-backup directory into the intended destination
directory. You can do this with 'rdiff-backup -r now', but you can
also just do it with 'cp -a' to recursively copy the whole
directory. (If you do a regular copy with 'cp' you can omit the
'rdiff-backup-data' subdirectory of the backup repository, which
contains the incremental information to roll back to earlier dates.)
When you say
This event has caused me to consolidate all of my chaotic file
systems and
backups into one home folder on the temporary laptop, and into an
rdiff-backup backup folder of this on an external usb drive. I did
this
yesterday, and not all in one go, and thus the folders and files
are as
per the first time rdiff-backup ran plus the increments (I have set
rdiff-backup to run hourly).
it appears that you may be thinking of the rdiff-backup repository in
a different way. That's not surprising; most incremental backup
systems (say, 'dump') store an initial full backup that doesn't get
touched later, and then store incremental changes going forward in
time. What rdiff-backup does is (sort of) the reverse - the main
backup repository actually reflects a full mirror of the *current*
state of the source filesystem (well, current as of the time rdiff-
backup was run), while the increments contain the information you
would need to go *backward* in time from that point, i.e. to restore
the destination to an earlier state. This takes a little getting
used to, but for many types of restores it is much easier - you often
want the recent data, not something far in the paste, and with this
system you can always find the most recent version of a file by just
browsing through the backup to the same location you would browse to
in your regular filesystem, and copying it directly from there.
Hope this clarifies things,
Eric
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