is a backup software written in Python that creates reverse incremental backups. The most recentbackup is thus directly accessible, while earlier backups will be reconstructed from diff files by rdiff-backup. As the name implies, rdiff-backup uses the rdiffmethod to compute the differences between file versions. rdiff-backup is able to back up files across different machines via ssh.
Usage
Backup
Normal operation is rdiff-backup . gzip compression of increment files can be disabled with --no-compression. The options -v 5 --print-statisticsshow the backup's progress and some statistics. Specifying --no-fsync will disable fsync, causing a significant speedup, with an elevated risk of data loss.
rdiff-backup --restore-as-of will restore to the entire backup, a single file or a sub-directory. can be specified in one of several ways:
as a date, for example "2020-02-14", or as a datetime string like "2020-02-14T12:26:53+02:00"
as a time span, for example "1M" will restore the files as they were one month ago
as a number of backups, so "10B" will restore the 10th most-recent version
or "now", which will restore the most recent backup.
It is also possible to find the relevant time-stamped file in the rdiff-backup-data/increments directory, and run rdiff-backup folder to be restored>. Simpler, the most recent backup can also be restored by copying a back-upped file or directory with cp -a or rsync -a. A deleted file – recognizable by the suffix snapshot.gz – can also be restored by retrieving it in the rdiff-backup-data/increments directory, copying it to the source directory, and unpacking with gzip.
Only the oldest backups can be removed, with rdiff-backup --remove-older-than . The ability to delete the oldest versions of specific files is scheduled to appear in version 2.2. When deleting old versions, takes the same arguments as when restoring files or directories.
Problems
As of version 2.0.0, rdiff-backup does not work with exFATfile systems, though FAT and NTFS are both supported. rdiff-backup recognizes changed files only by file size as well as modification time. To make sure all changed files have been back-upped, running rdiff-backup --compare-hash will display all changed files. Then, using touch, the modification time of all problematic files can be reset to now, and thus, they will be included during the next rdiff-backup run.
