Thanks David, that is helpful.

It would be good if there was a way of removing a subset of data from the entire repository. So let's say I put a 500GB folder in /home by accident and it has gone into the repository and is bloating it. I can exclude it from my future rdiff-backup runs but the folder will still be held as snapshot[s]. If I run --remove-older-than it will remove all data older than whenever, but I want to keep all the other stuff and just remove this folder (and its contents).

Quite a common scenario but rdiff-backup can't handle it (AFAIK) and I don't know of a reliable workaround (apart from: get a bigger disk for the repository).

Dominic

On 08/01/11 10:15, D. Kriesel wrote:
Hi, according to rdiff-backups doc, excluded files are just treated as if they 
would not exist. This means that a snapshot of such a file will be created in 
the metadata once a backup run with the exclusion is performed, and the file 
will be deleted from the mirror data.llyu

Cheers, david



"Dominic Raferd"<domi...@timedicer.co.uk>  schrieb:

I agree that makes sense in terms of the question in the body of your
posting. But the subject of your posting was a slightly different
question: 'What happens if you add a --exclude to an existing
rdiff-backup?'

If a week ago you added  --exclude /home/fred to your rdiff-backup line

backing up /home, will /home/fred now be removed from the destination
by
a "--remove-older-than 5D" run?

In other words, if you add exclusion criteria to an existing
rdiff-backup run, are the copies of the newly-excluded files removed
>from the main repository and placed in the increments folder [in which
case they *would* be removed by a subsequent --remove-older-than
command], or are they just left where they were [in which case they
*wouldn't* be]?

I don't know the answer, but if someone does I would be interested.

Dominic

On 07/01/11 21:31, Chris G wrote:
On Fri, Jan 07, 2011 at 02:38:45PM -0500, cov...@ccs.covici.com
wrote:
When the files are deleted, they are copied to the increments folder
and
kept till they are removed by --remove-older-than.

That makes sense, thank you.

Chris G<c...@isbd.net>   wrote:

If you delete files/directories from the 'source' of an
rdiff-backup
will they get removed from the destination with an appropriate
"--remove-older-than" run?

For example if rdiff-backup has been backing up a hierarchy with a
directory called 'tmp' for a while and then the 'tmp' directory is
removed can one get rdiff-backup to remove the 'tmp' backups 7 days
later by "--remove-older-than 7D".

  From the man page it sounds as if deleted files *will* be
removed:-
                Note that snapshots of deleted files are covered by
this  opera-
                tion.  Thus if you deleted a file two weeks ago,
backed up imme-
                diately afterwards, and then  ran  rdiff-backup
with  --remove-
                older-than  10D  today,  no  trace  of  that  file
would remain.
                Finally, file selection options such as --include
and  --exclude
                don't affect --remove-older-than.

But this bit from the examples section of the documentation worries
me
slightly:-

      Note that an existing file which hasn't changed for a year
will still be
      preserved. But a file which was deleted 15 days ago cannot be
restored
      after this command is run.

--
Chris Green



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