On 12/20/22 7:46 AM, Dieter Heußner via Any discussion of rdiff-backup wrote:
Hello,
could somebody shed some light to the question of restoring files backed up by
rdiff-
backup, please?
Given an original file, say file A. It will be backed up with rdiff-backup, and
also
its increments (assuming that there are many changes to file A).
When restoring a given version of that file,
a) does rdiff-backup construct the desired version step-wise by applying ALL
increments of that file (in chronological order beginning with the original
version), OR
b) does rdiff-backup start with the original file (file A) and ONLY applies
the most recent
increment which relates immediately prior or precisely to the timestamp of the
desired version to be restored?
In my understanding, if a) was true, deleting increments (say older than n
weeks) would not always result in the desired version because of probably
missing
increments. If b) was true, the goal can be achieved. However, as a newbie to
rdiff-backup
I am not sure at all.
rdiff-backup always starts with the _most_ _recent_ version of the file (the one stored
in the mirror). If what you want is an earlier version, the stored reverse-diffs are
applied in reverse chronological sequence (most recent diff first) until reaching the
date you want. You can freely delete (using "rdiff-backup remove-increments
--older-than ...", and _not_ by manually deleting files from the repository
yourself) anything older than the history you want to preserve.
--
Bob Nichols "NOSPAM" is really part of my email address.
Do NOT delete it.
