rdiff-backup(1) Manual 2.2.0 rdiff-backup(1)
NAME
rdiff-backup - local/remote mirror and incremental backup
SYNOPSIS
rdiff-backup [options...] action [sub-options...] [locations...]
rdiff-backup [--new] [-h|--help|-V|--version]
DESCRIPTION
rdiff-backup is a script, written in python(1) that backs up one
directory to another. The target directory ends up a copy (mirror) of
the source directory, but extra reverse diffs are stored in a special
sub-directory of that target directory, so you can still recover files
lost some time ago. The idea is to combine the best features of a mirror
and an incremental backup. rdiff-backup also preserves symlinks, special
files, hardlinks, permissions, uid/gid ownership, and modification times.
rdiff-backup can also operate in a bandwidth efficient manner over a
pipe, like rsync(1). Thus you can use ssh and rdiff-backup to securely
back a hard drive up to a remote location, and only the differences will
be transmitted. Using the default settings, rdiff-backup requires that
the remote system accept ssh connections, and that rdiff-backup is
installed in the user's PATH on the remote system. See the REMOTE
OPERATION section for details.
Note that you should not write to the mirror directory except with
rdiff-backup. Many of the increments are stored as reverse diffs, so if
you delete or modify a file, you may lose the ability to restore previous
versions of that file.
Finally, this man page is intended more as a precise description of the
behavior and syntax of rdiff-backup. New users may want to check out the
examples file included in the rdiff-backup distribution.
The rdiff-backup commands knows four types of parameters
1. generic options valid for all actions,
2. one action out of backup, calculate, complete, compare, info, list,
regress, remove, restore, server, test, verify,
3. sub-options applicable to each action specifically, even though some
are common to multiple actions,
4. zero, one, two or more location paths, either local or remote.
Note that this documents the new command line interface of rdiff-backup
since 2.1+; for the traditional one, check rdiff-backup-old(1) but
consider that it is deprecated and will disappear.
Options
-h, --help
Prints brief usage information and exits. Add --new to be sure to
get this CLI description, and not the old one. Placed after the
action, outputs the action's specific help message.
-V, --version
Prints the current version number and exits.
--api-version apiversion
Sets the API version to the given integer between minimum and maximum
versions as given by the info action. It is the responsibility of
the user to make sure that this version is also supported by any
server started by this client.
--chars-to-quote, --override-chars-to-quote chars
If the filesystem to which we are backing up is not case-sensitive,
automatic "quoting" of characters occurs. For example, a file
'Developer.doc' will be converted into ';068eveloper.doc'. To quote
other characters or force quoting, e.g. in case rdiff-backup doesn't
recognize a case-insensitive file system, you need to specify this
option. chars is a string of characters fit to be used in regexp
square brackets (e.g. 'A-Z' as in '[A-Z]').
Caution
do NOT change the chars to quote within the same repository!
Actually, you only need to set this parameter when creating a new
backup repository. Do also NOT quote any character used by
rdiff-backup in rdiff-backup-data (any of 'a-z0-9._-')!
--current-time currenttime
This option is useful mainly for testing. If set, rdiff-backup will
use it for the current time instead of consulting the clock. The
argument is the number of seconds since the epoch.
--force
Authorize a more drastic modification of a directory than usual (for
instance, when overwriting of a destination path, or when removing
multiple sessions with remove). rdiff-backup will generally tell you
if it needs this.
Caution
You can cause data loss if you mis-use this option.
Furthermore, do NOT use this option when doing a restore, as it
will DELETE files, unless you absolutely know what you are doing.
--fsync, --no-fsync
This will enable/disable issuing fsync from rdiff-backup altogether.
This option is designed to optimize performance on busy backup
systems.
Caution
This may render your backup unusable in case of filesystem
failure.
Default is hence for fsync to be enabled.
--new, --no-new
enforce (or not) the usage of the new parameters. The default
currently is to show the old usage, but this will change in the near
future.
--null-separator
Use nulls (\0) instead of newlines (\n) as line separators, which may
help when dealing with filenames containing newlines. This affects
the expected format of the files specified by the
--{include|exclude}-filelist[-stdin] switches as well as the format
of the files statistics.
--parsable-output
If set, rdiff-backup's output will be tailored for easy parsing by
computers, instead of convenience for humans. Currently this only
applies when listing increments using the list increments action,
where the time will be given in seconds since the epoch.
--remote-schema remoteschema
Specify an alternate method of connecting to a remote computer. This
is necessary to get rdiff-backup not to use ssh for remote backups,
or if, for instance, rdiff-backup is not in the PATH on the remote
side. See the REMOTE OPERATION section for details.
--remote-tempdir dirpath
use path as temporary directory on the remote side of the connection.
If set explicitly, remember that "no space left" error messages might
apply to this directory.
--ssh-compression, --no-ssh-compression
use SSH with or without compression with default remote-schema. This
option is ignored when using --remote-schema. Compression is on by
default.
--tempdir dirpath
Sets the directory that rdiff-backup uses for temporary files to the
given path. The environment variables TMPDIR, TEMP, and TMP can also
be used to set the temporary files directory. See the documentation
of the Python tempfile module for more information. If set
explicitly, remember that "no space left" error messages might apply
to this directory.
--terminal-verbosity {0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9}
select which verbosity to use for messages on the terminal, the
default is given by --verbosity.
--use-compatible-timestamps
Create timestamps in which the hour/minute/second separator is a -
(hyphen) instead of a : (colon). It is safe to use this option on
one backup, and then not use it on another; rdiff-backup supports the
intermingling of different timestamp formats. This option is enabled
by default on platforms which require that the colon be escaped.
-v, --verbosity {0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9}
Specify verbosity level (0 is totally silent, 3 is the default, and 9
is noisiest). This determines how much is written to the log file,
and without using --terminal-verbosity to the terminal..
Actions
backup [CREATION OPTIONS] [COMPRESSION OPTIONS] [SELECTION OPTIONS]
[FILESYSTEM OPTIONS] [USER GROUP OPTIONS] [STATISTICS OPTIONS] sourcedir
targetdir
back-up a source directory to a target backup repository.
calculate [--method average] statfile1 statfile2 [...]
calculate average across multiple statistics files
--method average
there is currently only one method and it is the default, but it
might change in the future.
complete [--cword index] [--unique|--no-unique] -- words [...]
outputs a list of fitting options given already entered parameters.
This option is of no relevance to backup tasks, it is only to be used
to support programmatic completion like in bash. See the
documentation for more details if you plan to write your own
completion code, e.g. for an alternative shell.
--cword index
index where the cursor currently is within the list of words.
--unique,--no-unique
should parameters already entered by the user be offered again,
or not?
compare [SELECTION OPTIONS] [--method method] [--at time] sourcedir
targetdir
Compare a directory with the backup set at the given time. This can
be useful to see how archived data differs from current data, or to
check that a backup is current.
--method method
method used to compare can be either meta, full or hash, where
the default is meta, which is also how rdiff-backup decides which
file needs to be backed-up. Note that with full, the repository
data will be copied in its entirety to the source side and
compared byte by byte. This is the slowest but most complete
compare method. With hash only the SHA1 checksum of regular
files will be compared. With meta only the metadata of files
will be compared (name, size, date, type, etc).
--at time
at which time of the back-up directory should the comparaison
take place. The default is now, meaning the latest version. See
TIME FORMATS for details.
info
outputs information about the current system in YAML format, so that
it can be used in a bug report, and exits.
list files [--changed-since time|--at time] repository
list modified or existing files in a given back-up repository.
--changed-since time
List the files that have changed in the destination directory
since the given time. See TIME FORMATS for the format of time.
If a directory in the archive is specified, list only the files
under that directory. This option does not read the source
directory; it is used to compare the contents of two different
rdiff-backup sessions. See TIME FORMATS for details.
--at time
List the files in the archive that were present at the given
time. If a directory in the archive is specified, list only the
files under that directory. See TIME FORMATS for details.
list increments [--no-size|--size] repository
list increments with date in a given back-up repository.
--no-size,--size
Show or not the size of each increment in the repository. The
default is to not show sizes. When showing sizes, it becomes
allowable to specify a directory within a repository, then only
the cumulated sizes of that directory will be shown.
regress [COMPRESSION OPTIONS] [USER GROUP OPTIONS] [TIMESTAMP OPTIONS]
repository
If an rdiff-backup session fails, this action will undo the failed
directory. This happens automatically if you attempt to back-up to a
directory and the last backup failed. You can use the --force option
to undo the last backup even if it wasn't failed.
remove increments --older-than time repository
Remove the incremental backup information in the destination
directory that has been around longer than the given time, or the
oldest one if no time is provided.
By default, rdiff-backup will only delete information from one
session at a time. To remove two or more sessions at the same time,
supply the --force option (rdiff-backup will tell you if it is
required).
Note that snapshots of deleted files are covered by this operation.
Thus if you deleted a file two weeks ago, backed up immediately
afterwards, and then ran rdiff-backup with 'remove increments
--older-than 10D' today, no trace of that file would remain.
--older-than time
all the increments older than the given time will be deleted.
See TIME FORMATS for details.
restore [CREATION OPTIONS] [COMPRESSION OPTIONS] [SELECTION OPTIONS]
[FILESYSTEM OPTIONS] [USER GROUP OPTIONS] [--at time|--increment] source
targetdir
restore a source backup repository at a specific time or a specific
source increment to a target directory. See RESTORING for details.
--at time
the source parameter is interpreted as a back-up directory, and
the content is restored from the given time. See TIME FORMATS
for details.
--increment
the source parameter is expected to be an increment within a
back-up repository, to be restored into the given target
directory.
server [RESTRICT OPTIONS] [--debug]
Enter server mode (not to be invoked directly, but instead used by
another rdiff-backup process on a remote computer).
--debug
Start the server in debug mode so that it stops on an early
breakpoint and can be remotely debugged using rpdb
<https://github.com/tamentis/rpdb>. See the developer's
documentation
<https://github.com/rdiff-backup/rdiff-backup/blob/master/docs/DEVELOP.adoc#debug-client-server-mode>
for details.
test remote_location_1 [remote_location_2 ...]
Test for the presence of a compatible rdiff-backup server as
specified in the remote location argument(s) (of which the filename
section will be checked for existence). See the REMOTE OPERATION
section for details.
verify [--at time] location
Check all the data in the repository at the given time by computing
the SHA1 hash of all the regular files and comparing them with the
hashes stored in the metadata file.
--at time
the time of the data which needs to be verified. See TIME
FORMATS for details.
COMPRESSION OPTIONS
--compression, --no-compression
Enable or disable the default gzip compression of most of the
.snapshot and .diff increment files stored in the rdiff-backup-data
directory. A backup volume can contain compressed and uncompressed
increments, so using this option inconsistently is fine. Default is
to compress all files, except those excluded as noted below.
--not-compressed-regexp regexp
Do not compress increments based on files whose filenames match
regexp. The default includes many common audiovisual and archive
files, and may be found from the help.
CREATION OPTIONS
--create-full-path
Normally only the final directory of the destination path will be
created if it does not exist. With this option, all missing
directories on the destination path will be created. Use this option
with care: if there is a typo in the remote path, the remote
filesystem could fill up very quickly (by creating a duplicate backup
tree). For this reason this option is primarily aimed at scripts
which automate backups.
FILESYSTEM OPTIONS
--acls, --no-acls
enable/disable back-up of Access Control Lists.
--carbonfile, --no-carbonfile
enable/disable back-up of carbon files (MacOS X).
--eas, --no-eas
enable/disable back-up of Extended Attributes.
--resource-forks, --no-resource-forks
enable/disable back-up of resource forks (MacOS X).
--hard-links, --no-hard-links
do (or not) keep hard-link relationships between files. Disabling
hard-links generally increases the disk space usage but decreases
memory usage. Hard-links are disabled by default if the backup
source or restore destination is running on native Windows.
--compare-inode, --no-compare-inode
This option prevents rdiff-backup from flagging a hardlinked file as
changed when its device number and/or inode changes. This option is
useful in situations where the source filesystem lacks persistent
device and/or inode numbering. For example, network filesystems may
have mount-to-mount differences in their device number (but possibly
stable inode numbers); USB/1394 devices may come up at different
device numbers each remount (but would generally have same inode
number); and there are filesystems which don't even have the same
inode numbers from use to use. Without the option rdiff-backup may
generate unnecessary numbers of tiny diff files.
--never-drop-acls
Exit with error instead of dropping ACLs or ACL entries. Normally
this may happen (with a warning) because the destination does not
support them or because the relevant user/group names do not exist on
the destination side.
RESTRICT OPTIONS
--restrict-path dirpath
Require that all file access be inside the given path. This switch,
and --restrict-mode, are intended to be used with the server action
to provide a bit more protection when doing automated remote backups.
Caution
Those options are not intended as your only line of defense so
please don't do something silly like allow public access to an
rdiff-backup server run with --restrict-mode read-only.
--restrict-mode {read-write,read-only,update-only}
restriction mode for the directory given by --restrict-path, either
full access (aka read-write), read-only, or only to update
incrementally an already existing back-up (default is read-write).
SELECTION OPTIONS
This section only quickly lists the existing options, the section FILE
SELECTION explains those more in details.
Globs, Regex, File lists selection
--include,--exclude glob
Include/exclude the file or files matched by glob (also known as
shell pattern). If a directory is excluded, then files under that
directory will also be excluded.
--include-globbing-filelist,--exclude-globbing-filelist globsfile
Include/exclude according to the listed globs, similar to --include
or --exclude.
--include-globbing-filelist-stdin,--exclude-globbing-filelist-stdin
Like the previous option but the list of globs is coming from
standard input.
--include-regexp,--exclude-regexp regexp
Include/exclude files matching the given regexp (according to Python
rules).
--include-filelist,--exclude-filelist listfile
Include/exclude the files listed in filelist. This is a best fit for
an automatically generated list of files, else use globbing.
--include-filelist-stdin,--exclude-filelist-stdin
Like the previous but the filelist is coming from standard input.
Special files selection
Note
All special files are included by default, so that including them
explicitly isn't generally required.
Exceptions are described.
--include-device-files,--exclude-device-files
Include/exclude all device files. This can be useful for
security/permissions reasons or if rdiff-backup is not handling
device files correctly.
--include-fifos,--exclude-fifos
Include/exclude all fifo files.
--include-sockets,--exclude-sockets
Include/exclude all socket files.
--include-symbolic-links,--exclude-symbolic-links
Include/exclude all symbolic links. Contrary to the general rule,
symlinks are excluded by default under Windows so that NTFS reparse
points aren't backed-up.
--include-special-files,--exclude-special-files
Include/exclude all the special files listed above.
Other selections
--include-other-filesystems,--exclude-other-filesystems
Include/exclude files on file systems (identified by device number)
other than the file system the root of the source directory is on.
The default is to include other filesystems.
--include-if-present,--exclude-if-present filename
Include/exclude directories if they contain the given filename.
Files directly in an included directory are also considered included.
This doesn't apply recursively though so that the filename must be
present in all directories of a hierarchy for it to be fully
included.
--max-file-size sizeinbytes
Exclude files that are larger than the given size in bytes.
--min-file-size sizeinbytes
Exclude files that are smaller than the given size in bytes.
STATISTICS OPTIONS
--file-statistics, --no-file-statistics
Enable/disable writing to the 'file_statistics' file in the
rdiff-backup-data directory. rdiff-backup will run slightly quicker
and take up a bit less space. Default is to write the statistics
file(s).
See the FILES section for more information about statistics files.
--no-print-statistics, --print-statistics
Summary statistics will be printed (or not) after a successful
backup. Even if disabled (the default), this information will still
be available from the session statistics file.
TIMESTAMP OPTIONS
--allow-duplicate-timestamps
This option is only to be used if you encounter the issue of metadata
mirrors with the same timestamp. In such cases, you may use this
flag to first recover from the failed backup with something like
rdiff-backup --allow-duplicate-timestamps \
--check-destination-dir {targetdir}
after which you will need to remove those old duplicate entries using
the remove increments action.
USER GROUP OPTIONS
See the USERS AND GROUPS section for more information.
--group-mapping-file mapfile
Map group names and IDs according to the group mapping file mapfile.
--user-mapping-file mapfile
Map user names and IDs according to the user mapping file mapfile.
--preserve-numerical-ids
If set, rdiff-backup will preserve uids/gids instead of trying to
preserve unames and gnames.
RESTORING
There are two ways to tell rdiff-backup to restore a file or directory:
1. you can run rdiff-backup restore on a mirror file and define a time
from which to restore (by default the latest one).
2. you can run the restore action on an increment file with the
sub-option --increment.
For example, suppose in the past you have run:
rdiff-backup backup /usr /usr.backup
to back up the '/usr' directory into the '/usr.backup' directory, and now
want a copy of the '/usr/local' directory the way it was 3 days ago
placed at '/usr/local.old'.
One way to do this is to run:
rdiff-backup restore --at 3D /usr.backup/local /usr/local.old
here above the '3D' means 3 days (for other ways to specify the time, see
the TIME FORMATS section). The '/usr.backup/local' directory was
selected, because that is the directory containing the current version of
'usr/local'.
Note that the parameter of --at always specifies an exact time. (So '3D'
refers to the moment 72 hours before the present). If there was no
backup made at that time, rdiff-backup restores the state recorded for
the previous backup. For instance, in the above case, if '3D' is used,
and there are only backups from 2 days and 4 days ago, '/usr/local' as it
was 4 days ago will be restored.
The second way to restore files involves finding the corresponding
increment file. It would be in the
'/backup/rdiff-backup-data/increments/usr' directory, and its name would
be something like 'local.2002-11-09T12:43:53-04:00.dir' where the time
indicates it is from 3 days ago. Note that the increment files all end
in '.diff', '.snapshot', '.dir', or '.missing', where '.missing' just
means that the file didn't exist at that time (finally, some of these may
be gzip-compressed, and have an extra '.gz' to indicate this). Then
running:
rdiff-backup restore --increment \
/backup/rdiff-backup-data/increments/usr/local.{time}.dir \
/usr/local.old
would also restore the file as desired.
If you are not sure exactly which version of a file you need, it is
probably easiest to either restore from the increments files as described
immediately above, or to see which increments are available with 'list
increments', and then specify an exact time with --at.
TIME FORMATS
rdiff-backup uses time strings in two places.
Firstly, all of the increment files rdiff-backup creates will have the
time in their filenames in the w3 datetime format as described in a w3
note at <https://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime>. Basically they look like
'2001-07-15T04:09:38-07:00', which is basically
"{Year}-{Month}-{Day}T{Hours}:{Minutes}:{Seconds}{Timezone}", the time
zone being 7 hours behind UTC in this example (hence the minus).
Secondly, the --at, --changed-since, --older-than options take a time
string, which can be given in any of several formats:
1. the string 'now' (refers to the current time)
2. a sequences of digits, like '123456890' (indicating the time in
seconds after the epoch)
3. A string like '2002-01-25T07:00:00+02:00' in datetime format
4. An interval, which is a number followed by one of the characters s,
m, h, D, W, M, or Y (indicating seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks,
months, or years respectively), or a series of such pairs. In this
case the string refers to the time that preceded the current time by
the length of the interval. For instance, '1h78m"' indicates the
time that was one hour and 78 minutes ago. The calendar here is
unsophisticated: a month is always 30 days, a year is always 365
days, and a day is always 86400 seconds.
5. A date format of the form "YYYY/MM/DD", "YYYY-MM-DD", "MM/DD/YYYY",
or "MM-DD-YYYY", which indicates midnight on the day in question,
relative to the current timezone settings. For instance, '2002/3/5',
'03-05-2002', and '2002-3-05' all mean March 5th, 2002 (needless to
say that starting with the year is less confusing for non-Americans).
6. A backup session specification which is a non-negative integer
followed by 'B'. For instance, '0B' specifies the time of the
current mirror, and '3B' specifies the time of the 3rd newest
increment.
REMOTE OPERATION
In order to access remote files, rdiff-backup opens up a pipe to a copy
of rdiff-backup running on the remote machine. Thus rdiff-backup must be
installed on both ends. To open this pipe, rdiff-backup first splits the
location into 'host_info::pathname'. It then substitutes 'host_info'
into the remote schema, and runs the resulting command, reading its input
and output.
The 'host_info' can be anything understood as a destination by your
version of SSH. Assuming it is the standard OpenSSH, it can be:
o either '[user@]hostname'
o or a URI of the form 'ssh://[user@]hostname[:port]'.
The default remote schema is 'ssh -C {h} rdiff-backup --server' where
'host_info' is substituted for '{h}'. So if the 'host_info' is
'user@host.net', then rdiff-backup runs 'ssh <user@host.net>
rdiff-backup --server'. Using --remote-schema, rdiff-backup can invoke
an arbitrary command in order to open up a remote pipe. For instance,
rdiff-backup backup --remote-schema 'cd /usr; {h}' \
foo 'rdiff-backup server'::bar
is basically equivalent to (but slower than)
rdiff-backup backup foo /usr/bar
Concerning quoting, if for some reason you need to put two consecutive
colons in the 'host_info' section of a 'host_info::pathname' argument, or
in the pathname of a local file, you can quote one of them by prepending
a backslash. So in 'a\::b::c', 'host_info' is 'a::b' and the pathname is
'c'. Similarly, if you want to refer to a local file whose filename
contains two consecutive colons, like 'strange::file', you'll have to
quote one of the colons as in 'strange\::file'. Because the backslash is
a quote character in these circumstances, it too must be quoted to get a
literal backslash, so 'foo\::\\bar' evaluates to 'foo::\bar'. To make
things more complicated, because the backslash is also a common shell
quoting character, you may need to type in '\\\\' at the shell prompt to
get a literal backslash.
You may also use the placehoders '{Vx}', '{Vy}' and '{Vz}' for the
'x.y.z' version of rdiff-backup, so that you can have multiple versions
of rdiff-backup installed on the server, and automatically targeted from
the client.
For example, if you have rdiff-backup 2.1.5 and 2.2.1 installed in
virtual environments on the server, respectively under
'/usr/local/lib/rdiff-backup-2.0' and '/usr/local/lib/rdiff-backup-2.1'
(we assume that the z-Version isn't relevant to any kind of
compatibility), then the client may be called with the following remote
schema:
ssh -C {h} /usr/local/lib/rdiff-backup-{Vx}.{Vy} --server
The client will then use the correct version of rdiff-backup based on its
own version 'x.y.z'. You'll find more explanations in the migration file
in the documentation.
And finally, to include a literal '%' in the string specified by
--remote-schema, quote it with another '%', as in '%%' (this is due to
the compatibility with the deprecated host placeholder '%s', which you
shouldn't use anymore).
Although ssh itself may be secure, using rdiff-backup in the default way
presents some security risks. For instance if the server is run as root,
then an attacker who compromised the client could then use rdiff-backup
to overwrite arbitrary server files by "backing up" over them. Such a
setup can be made more secure by using the sshd configuration option
'command="rdiff-backup server"' possibly along with the --restrict-path
and --restrict-mode options to rdiff-backup. For more information, see
the web page, the wiki, and the entries for those options on this man
page.
FILE SELECTION
rdiff-backup has a number of file selection options. When rdiff-backup
is run, it searches through the given source directory and backs up all
the files matching the specified options. This selection system may
appear complicated, but it is supposed to be flexible and easy-to-use.
If you just want to learn the basics, first look at the selection
examples in the examples file included in the package, or on the web at
<https://rdiff-backup.net/docs/examples.html>.
rdiff-backup's selection system was originally inspired by rsync(1), but
there are many differences. For instance, trailing backslashes have no
special significance.
Important
include and exclude patterns under Windows solely support slashes '/'
as file separators, given that backslashes '\' have a special meaning
in regex/glob patterns.
All the available file selection conditions are listed under SELECTION
OPTIONS.
Two principles need to be understood before really starting:
1. pattern matching is stupid about paths, it just does pattern matching
and can't interpret patterns like path, especially it can't resolve
absolute into relative paths and vice-versa (compare with the '-path'
option of find).
2. pattern matching is done on the complete path of each found file (no
partial matching and no file name matching). Beware that complete
path does not mean full path, it can be a complete relative path.
For example, the pattern 'bar' matches the path 'bar', but doesn't match
the path 'foo/bar' and neither the path './bar'. Both are matched by the
pattern '*/bar', as well as by '**/bar'. This last pattern would match
any path containing the file 'bar', e.g. 'foo/boz/bar'.
Each file selection condition either matches or doesn't match a given
file. A given file is excluded by the file selection system exactly when
the first matching file selection condition specifies that the file be
excluded; otherwise the file is included. When backing up, if a file is
excluded, rdiff-backup acts as if that file does not exist in the source
directory. When restoring, an excluded file is considered not to exist
in either the source or target directories.
For instance,
rdiff-backup backup --include /usr \
--exclude /usr /usr /backup
is exactly the same as
rdiff-backup backup /usr /backup
because the include and exclude directives match exactly the same files,
and the --include comes first, giving it precedence. Similarly,
rdiff-backup backup --include /usr/local/bin \
--exclude /usr/local /usr /backup
would backup the '/usr/local/bin' directory (and its contents), but not
'/usr/local/doc'.
The include, exclude, include-globbing-filelist, and
exclude-globbing-filelist options accept extended shell globbing
patterns. These patterns can contain the special patterns '*', '**',
'?', and '[...]'. As in a normal shell, '*' can be expanded to any
string of characters not containing '/', '?' expands to any character
except '/', and '[...]' expands to a single character of those characters
specified (ranges are acceptable). The new special pattern, '**',
expands to any string of characters whether or not it contains '/'.
Furthermore, if the pattern starts with 'ignorecase:' (case insensitive),
then this prefix will be removed and any character in the string can be
replaced with an upper or lowercase version of itself.
If you need to match filenames which contain the above globbing
characters, they may be escaped using a backslash '\'. The backslash
will only escape the character following it so for '**' you will need to
use '\*\*' to avoid escaping it to the '*' globbing character.
Remember that you may need to quote these characters when typing them
into a shell, so the shell does not interpret the globbing patterns
before rdiff-backup sees them.
The --exclude pattern option matches a file if and only if:
1. pattern can be expanded into the file's filename, or
2. the file is inside a directory matched by the option.
Conversely, --include pattern matches a file if and only if:
1. pattern can be expanded into the file's filename,
2. the file is inside a directory matched by the option, or
3. the file is a directory which contains a file matched by the option.
For example,
--exclude /usr/local
matches '/usr/local', '/usr/local/lib', and '/usr/local/lib/netscape'.
It is the same as
--exclude /usr/local --exclude '/usr/local/**'
And similarly:
--include /usr/local
specifies that '/usr', '/usr/local', '/usr/local/lib', and
'/usr/local/lib/netscape' (but not '/usr/doc') all be backed up. Thus
you don't have to worry about including parent directories to make sure
that included subdirectories have somewhere to go. Finally,
--include ignorecase:'/usr/[a-z0-9]foo/*/**.py'
would match a file like '/usr/5fOO/hello/there/world.py'. If it did
match anything, it would also match '/usr'. If there is no existing file
that the given pattern can be expanded into, the option will not match
'/usr'.
The --include-filelist, --exclude-filelist, --include-filelist-stdin, and
--exclude-filelist-stdin options also introduce file selection
conditions. They direct rdiff-backup to read in a file, each line of
which is a file specification, and to include or exclude the matching
files. Lines are separated by newlines or nulls, depending on whether
the --null-separator switch was given. Each line in a filelist is
interpreted similarly to the way extended shell patterns are, with a few
exceptions:
1. Globbing patterns like '*', '**', '?', and '[...]' are not expanded.
2. Include patterns do not match files in a directory that is included.
So '/usr/local' in an include file will not match '/usr/local/doc'.
3. Lines starting with '+ [...]' (plus followed by a space) are
interpreted as include directives, even if found in a filelist
referenced by --exclude-filelist. Similarly, lines starting with '-
[...]' (minus followed by a space) exclude files even if they are
found within an include filelist.
For example, if the file 'list.txt' contains the lines:
/usr/local
- /usr/local/doc
/usr/local/bin
+ /var
- /var
then '--include-filelist list.txt' would include '/usr', '/usr/local',
and '/usr/local/bin'. It would exclude '/usr/local/doc',
'/usr/local/doc/python', etc. It neither excludes nor includes
'/usr/local/man', leaving the fate of this directory to the next
specification condition. Finally, it is undefined what happens with
'/var'. A single file list should not contain conflicting file
specifications.
The --include-globbing-filelist and --exclude-globbing-filelist options
also specify filelists, but each line in the filelist will be interpreted
as a globbing pattern the way --include and --exclude options are
interpreted (although '+ ' and '- ' prefixing is still allowed). For
instance, if the file 'globbing-list.txt' contains the lines:
dir/foo
Then '--include-globbing-filelist globbing-list.txt' would be exactly the
same as specifying on the command line:
--include dir/foo --include dir/bar --exclude **
Finally, the --include-regexp and --exclude-regexp allow files to be
included and excluded if their filenames match a python regular
expression. Regular expression syntax is too complicated to explain
here, but is covered in Python's library reference. Unlike the --include
and --exclude options, the regular expression options don't match files
containing or contained in matched files. So for instance
--include '[0-9]{7}(?!foo)'
matches any files whose full pathnames contain 7 consecutive digits which
aren't followed by 'foo'. However, it wouldn't match '/home' even if
'/home/ben/1234567' existed.
USERS AND GROUPS
There can be complications preserving ownership across systems. For
instance the username that owns a file on the source system may not exist
on the destination. Here is how rdiff-backup maps ownership on the
source to the destination (or vice-versa, in the case of restoring):
1. If the --preserve-numerical-ids option is given, the remote files
will always have the same uid and gid, both for ownership and ACL
entries. This may cause unames and gnames to change.
2. Otherwise, attempt to preserve the user and group names for ownership
and in ACLs. This may result in files having different uids and gids
across systems.
3. If a name cannot be preserved (e.g. because the username does not
exist), preserve the original id, but only in cases of user and group
ownership. For ACLs, omit any entry that has a bad user or group
name.
4. The --user-mapping-file and --group-mapping-file options override
this behavior. If either of these options is given, the policy
described in 2 and 3 above will be followed, but with the mapped user
and group instead of the original. If you specify both
--preserve-numerical-ids and one of the mapping options, the behavior
is undefined.
The user and group mapping files both have the same format:
old_name_or_id1:new_name_or_id1
old_name_or_id2:new_name_or_id2
[...etc...]
Each line should contain a name or id, followed by a colon ':', followed
by another name or id. If a name or id is not listed, they are treated
in the default way described above.
When restoring, the above behavior is also followed, but note that the
original source user/group information will be the input, not the already
mapped user/group information present in the backup repository. For
instance, suppose you have mapped all the files owned by alice in the
source so that they are owned by ben in the repository, and now you want
to restore, making sure the files owned originally by alice are still
owned by alice. In this case there is no need to use any of the mapping
options. However, if you wanted to restore the files so that the files
originally owned by alice on the source are now owned by ben, you would
have to use the mapping options, even though you just want the unames of
the repository's files preserved in the restored files.
See USER GROUP OPTIONS for a list and description of related options.
FILES
any-config-file
you can create a file with one option/action/sub-option per line and
use it on the command line with an at sign prefix like
@any-config-file and its content will be interpreted as if given on
the command line.
For example, creating a file 'mybackup' with following content:
--verbosity
5
backup
source_dir
target_dir
and calling 'rdiff-backup @mybackup' will be the same as calling
'rdiff-backup --verbosity 5 backup source_dir target_dir'.
session_statistics, file_statistics
Every session rdiff-backup saves various statistics into two files,
the session statistics file at
'rdiff-backup-data/session_statistics.{datetime}.data' and the files
statistics at
'rdiff-backup-data/directory_statistics.{datetime}.data'. They are
both text files and contain similar information: how many files
changed, how many were deleted, the total size of increment files
created, etc. However, the session statistics file is intended to be
very readable and only describes the session as a whole. The files
statistics file is more compact (and slightly less readable) but
describes every directory backed up. It also may be compressed to
save space.
See also STATISTICS OPTIONS and the --null-separator option.
backup.log, restore.log, error_log
rdiff-backup will save various messages to the log file, which is
'rdiff-backup-data/backup.log' for backup sessions and
'rdiff-backup-data/restore.log' for restore sessions. Generally what
is written to this file will coincide with the messages displayed to
stdout or stderr, although this can be changed with the
--terminal-verbosity option.
Errors during backup are also written to a file
'rdiff-backup-data/error_log.{datetime}.data'.
The log files are not compressed and can become quite large if
rdiff-backup is run with high verbosity.
ENVIRONMENT
RDIFF_BACKUP_VERBOSITY=[0-9]
the default verbosity for log file and terminal, can be overwritten
by the corresponding options -v/--verbosity and --terminal-verbosity.
RDIFF_BACKUP_DEBUG=[address][:port]
set a non-default listening address and/or port (default is
127.0.0.1:4444) for rpdb. Valid values are address, address:port or
:port.
RETURN CODES
The following return codes have not been fully implemented so test before
you rely on them. Also note that they can be combined, so that for
example a return code 3 might be returned if a warning was found, then an
error.
0 - OK
the action was completely successful
1 - ERROR
something fatal happened, the whole action failed
2 - WARNING
any kind of unexpected behavior without complete failure
4 - FILE ERROR
the action failed on a single file (or more), but it wasn't the
reason for a complete failure
8 - FILE WARNING
the action stumbled on a single file (or more), or detected
differences in a comparaison
Tip
any other error code can and should be reported as a bug.
BUGS
See GitHub issues
<https://github.com/rdiff-backup/rdiff-backup/issues>
In doubt subscribe to and ask the mailing list
<https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/rdiff-backup-users>
AUTHORS
o Ben Escoto <ben@emerose.org> (retired)
o Eric Lavarde <ewl+rdiffbackup@lavar.de> (active)
SEE ALSO
python(1), rdiff(1), rsync(1), ssh(1).
The main rdiff-backup web page is at <https://rdiff-backup.net/>. It
has more documentation, links to the mailing list and source code.
rdiff-backup December 2022 rdiff-backup(1)
rdiff-backup 2.2.0 - Generated Thu Dec 22 13:10:28 CST 2022