And because it was such a nice FAQ, I made a pull request out of it: https://github.com/rdiff-backup/rdiff-backup/pull/435
KR, Eric On 26/07/2020 06:56, EricZolf wrote: > Hi, > > what Daryl + Frank wrote _but_ > > On 26/07/2020 06:27, Frank Crawford wrote: >> Any help would be appreciated! Using the delete script to delete >> all the directories that should have been excluded would take me a >> very long time. > > I'm surprised by this statement: regression takes a very long time, I > wouldn't swear that deleting the files is faster, but that would be my > expectation. > > Just to have a little bit of fact, I tried both actions on two copies of > the same repo (the restoretest3 repo we use in our tests): > > $ time .../rdiff-backup-regress.sh -f /tmp/restoretest3.reg > [...] > real 0m0.368s > user 0m0.299s > sys 0m0.064s > > $ time rdiff-backup-delete /tmp/restoretest3.del/nochange > [...] > real 0m0.042s > user 0m0.033s > sys 0m0.009s > > It's of course impossible to generalize from such a small test but > logically it makes sense that deleting takes ~10x less time: > > - deletion applies only to the unwanted files and their ancestors, and > implies only finding and deleting impacted files. > - regression requires finding all the files of the last generation, and > recreating them from the current one, via delta generation, and then > deleting the current generation (the mirror). This means calculating, > writing and deleting files. > > As said, I can't tell for your specific setup but given that you have > only one generation of the unwanted files, I guess that deletion will be > also much faster than regression, unless you have good reasons to > believe otherwise. > > KR, Eric >
