On Mon, Dec 16, 2013 at 11:55 AM, Colin Percival <[email protected]> wrote: > On 12/16/13 02:49, Mike Kallies wrote: >> For testing, we'd like to do a weekly automated restore on our standby >> hardware. The ideal way to do this would be to do an rsync-like >> restore. > > Tarsnap really isn't designed for that... :-/ > >> [snip] >> An rsync-like restore could greatly simplify this kind of test. Is >> there such a feature? Is there a different method which people use to >> test their backups which I'm overlooking? > > The closest you can get right now is the --keep-newer-files option (which > is actually "keep files which are not older") but that would still download > the entire contents of any files which have changed at all. > > I do have an idea for "tarsnap -x --sync" functionality which would reuse > the deduplication mechanism to identify parts of an existing file so that > they would not need to be downloaded, but that's not going to happen in > the near future.
Hello Colin, Thanks for the tip, was just taking some time to think about the answer. The --keep-newer-files would mostly do what we need. One exception though I think are deletions. Over time they would pile up on the local target and create some retention issues. Like you say, not a current design goal for Tarsnap. I think I can come up with some programmatic stuff to solve our specific issue. It's pretty minor. Great software, thanks again for your help... and Seasons Greetings and all that! -Mike
