New in v0.6.0 (2002/03/14) -------------------------- Fixed some assorted manual "bugs". Fixed endless loop bug in certain error recovery situation reported by Nick Duffek, and slightly changed around some other error correction code. Switching to new version numbering system: versions x.2n+1.x are unstable, versions x.2n.x are supposed to be more stable. New in v0.5.4 (2002/03/06) -------------------------- Fixed bug present since 0.5.0 wherein rdiff-backup would make snapshots instead of diffs when regular files change. May have fixed race condition involving rdiff execution. New in v0.5.3 (2002/03/03) -------------------------- It turns out the previous version broke device handling. Sorry about that.. New in v0.5.2 (2002/03/02) -------------------------- Fixed bugs which made rdiff-backup try to preserve mod times when it wasn't necessary, and exit instead of warning when it wasn't being run as root and found a file it didn't own. (Reported by Alberto Accomazi.) Added some more error checking; maybe this will fix a bug reported by John Goerzen wherein rdiff-backup can crash if file is deleted while rdiff-backup is processing it. Changed locations of some of the temp files; filenames will be determined by the tempfile module. New in v0.5.1 (2002/02/22) -------------------------- When establishing a connection, print a warning if the server version is different from the client version. When find rdiff error value 256, tell user that it is probably because rdiff couldn't be found in the path. Fixed a serious bug that can apparently cause a remote backups to fail (reported by John Goerzen). May have fixed a bug that causes recovery from certain errors to fail. New in v0.5.0 (2002/02/17) -------------------------- Now every so often (default is 20 seconds, the --checkpoint-interval option controls it) rdiff-backup checkpoints by dumping its state to temporary files in the rdiff-backup-data directory. If rdiff-backup is rerun with the same destination directory, it can either try to resume the previous backup or at least clean things up so the archive is consistent and accurate. Added new options --resume, --no-resume, and --resume-interval, which control when rdiff-backup tries to resume a previous failed backup. Fixed a bug with the --exclude-device-files option which caused the option to be ignored when the source directory was remote. By default, if rdiff-backup encounters a certain kind of IOError (currently types 26 and 5) while trying to access a file, it logs the error, skips the file, and tries to continue. If settings requiring an integer argument (like -v or --checkpoint-interval) are given a bad (non-integer) argument, fail with better explanation. Fixed annoying logging bug. Now no matter which computer a logging message originates on, it should be routed to the process which is writing to the logging file, and written correctly. However, logging messages about network traffic will not be routed, as this will generate more traffic and lead to an infinite regress. When calling rdiff, uses popen2.Popen3 and os.spawnvp instead of os.popen and os.system. This should make rdiff-backup more secure. Thanks to Jamie Heilman for the suggestion. Instead of calling the external shell command 'stat', rdiff-backup uses os.lstat().st_rdev to determine a device file's major and minor numbers. The new method should be more portable. Thanks to Jamie Heilman for the suggestion. All the file operations were examined and tweaked to try to minimize/eliminate the chance of leaving the backup directory in an inconsistent state. Upon catchable kinds of errors, try to checkpoint before exiting so later rdiff-backup processes have more information to work with. At the suggestion of Jason Piterak, added a --windows-time-format option so rdiff-backup will (perhaps) work under MS windows NT. New in v0.4.4 (2002/01/09) -------------------------- Applied Berkan Eskikaya's "xmas patch" (I was travelling and didn't have a chance on Christmas). He fixed important bugs in the --terminal-verbosity and --remove-older-than options. Added an --exclude-device-files option, which makes rdiff-backup skip any device files in the same way it skips files selected with the --exclude option. New in v0.4.3 (2001/12/17) -------------------------- Plugged another memory hole. At first I thought it might have been python's fault, but it was all me. If rdiff-backup uses more than a few megabytes of memory, tell me because it is probably another memory hole.. rdiff-backup is now a bit more careful about deleting temporary files it creates when it is done with them. Changed the rpm spec a little. The enclosed man page is gzipped and the package file is GPG signed (it can be checked with, for example, "rpm --checksig -v rdiff-backup-0.4.3-1.noarch.rpm"). rdiff-backup no longer checks the mtimes or atimes of device files. Use of these times was inconsistent (sometimes writing to device files updates their times, sometimes not) and leads to unnecessary backing up of files. New in v0.4.2 (2001/11/19) -------------------------- Significant speed increases (maybe 20% for local sessions) when dealing with directories that do not need to be updated much. Fixed memory leak. rdiff-backup should now run in almost constant memory (about 6MB on my system). Enabled buffering of object transfers, so remote sessions can be 50-100%+ faster. rdiff-backup now thinks it is running as root if the destination connection is root. Thus rdiff-backup will preserve ownership even if it is not running as root on the source end. If you abort rdiff-backup or it fails for some reason, it is now more robust about recovering the next time it is run (before it could fail in ways which made subsequent sessions fail also). However, it is still not a good idea to abort, as individual files could be in the process of being written and could get corrupted. If rdiff-backup encounters an unreadable file (or, if --change-source-perms is given, a file whose permissions it cannot change), it will log a warning, ignore the file, and continue, instead of exiting with an error. New in v0.4.1 (2001/11/9) ------------------------- Now either the source, or the target, or both can be remote. To make this less confusing, now rdiff-backup supports host::file notation. So it is legal to run: rdiff-backup bill@host1.net::source_file jones@host2.net::target Also, the test suites have been improved and found a number of bugs (which were then fixed). New in v0.4.0 (2001/11/4) ------------------------- Much of the rdiff-backup internals were rewritten. The result should be better performance when operating remotely over a pipe with significant latency. Also the code dealing with changing permissions is much cleaner, and should generalize later to similar jobs (for instance preserving atimes.) Listing and deleting increments and restoring should work remotely now. In earlier versions a file or directory had to be restored locally and then copied over to its final destination. At the request of the FSF, a copy of the GPL has been included in the packaged distributions. It is in the file "COPYING". New in v0.3.4 (2001/10/31) -------------------------- A change in python from the 2.2a series to 2.2b series made remote backup on version 0.3.3 stop work, a small change fixes it. (Thanks to Berkan Eskikaya for telling me about this.) Listed some missing features/bugs on the manual page. New in v0.3.3 (2001/10/16) -------------------------- Changed quoting system yet again after learning that the old system was not very portable between shells (thanks Hans ) New in v0.3.2 (2001/10/9) ------------------------- Added --list-increments and --remove-older-than commands. --list-increments will just tell you what increments you have and their dates. This isn't anything you couldn't get from "ls", but it may be formatted more nicely. The --remove-older-than command is used to delete older increments that you don't want, or don't have space for. Also, on some systems ssh was adding a spurious "Broken pipe" message, even though everything went fine. Maybe this version will prevent this confusing message. New in v0.3.1 (2001/9/11) ------------------------- Fix for stupid bug - when running remotely as users with different uids, rdiff-backup now doesn't check the uid/gid. Before it kept thinking that the files needed to be updated because they didn't have the right ownership. This shouldn't have resulted in any data loss - just some unnecessary .rdiff files. (Thanks to Michael Friedlander for finding this.) Added check to make sure that rdiff exits successfully. New in v0.3.0 (2001/9/9 - Billennium edition) --------------------------------------------- rdiff-backup has been almost completely rewritten for v0.3.0, as it was for v0.1.0. The main problem with versions 0.2.x was that the networking code was added to the not-remote-capable v0.1, and the result was unyieldy and prone to bugs when operating over a pipe. There are some new features: - Hopefully very few bugs, at least in basic file handling. rdiff-backup has an extensive testing suite now, so it should be much more reliable. - Complete support for reading and writing from and to files and directories that lack permissions, by temporarily changing them, and then changing them back later. (See for instance the --change-source-perms switch.) As I found out there is a lot to this, so much that I'm not sure in retrospect I should have bothered. :-) - New more standard format for increment files. See http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime for the time standard. The old format, besides being less standard, didn't take timezones into account. - In the initial mirroring, rdiff-backup only copies the files that it needs to, so it is much quicker when you almost have an initial mirror already. You can even the --mirror-only switch and make rdiff-backup into a slow version of rsync. - Terminal and file verbosity levels can be selected separately. So if you like a lot in your backup.log/restore.log but not much on your terminal, or vice-versa, you can set them at different numbers. - New --test-server option so if something goes wrong you can see if it is because the server on the other side isn't being initialized properly. - New --no-rdiff-copy option, which disables using rdiff to move files across a connection (it will still be used to make increment files however). If the bottleneck is not bandwidth but local disks/CPUs, this options should speed things up. There are, however, a few negatives: - rdiff-backup now requires Python version 2.2 or later. Sorry for the inconvenience but I use the new features a lot. - It may be slightly slower overall than versions 0.2.x - the remote code is cleaner, but probably has higher overhead. At least on my computer, rdiff-backup is still quicker than rsync for local mirroring of large files, but for remote mirroring, rsync will usually be much quicker, because it uses a fairly low-overhead pipelining protocol. - Any old increments are incompatible because they use a different date/time standard. If this is a big deal, try mailing me. A converter shouldn't be very difficult to write, but I didn't want to take the time unless someone really wanted it. New in v0.2.8 (2001/9/4) ------------------------- Fixed two stupid bugs that would cause rdiff-backup to exit with an exception. (I can't believe they were in there.) New in v0.2.7 (2001/8/29) ------------------------- Added new long options --backup-mode and --verbosity which are equivalent to -b and -v. rdiff-backup should be a little more resistant to the filesystem it is backup up changing underneath it (although it is not setup to handle this in general). Thanks Alberto Accomazzi for these suggestions. New in v0.2.6 (2001/8/27) ------------------------- Fixed bug where, for non-root users, rdiff-backup could, in the process of mirroring an unwritable directory, make the copy unwriteable and then fail. Now rdiff-backup goes through and makes what it needs to be readable and writeable, and then changes things back at the end. (Another one found by Jeb Campbell!) New in v0.2.5 (2001/8/26) ------------------------- Added better error reporting when server throws an exception. Fixed bug so that backed-up setuid files will also be setuid. Now rdiff-backup thinks it's running as root only if both client and server are running as root (Thanks to Jeb Campbell for finding these previous two bugs). Fixed miscellaneous Path bug that could occur in remote operation. New in v0.2.4 (2001/8/25) ------------------------- Added more logging options that may help other track down a mysterious bug. New in v0.2.3 (2001/8/24) ------------------------- Fixed typing bug that caused an Assertion Error in remote operation, thanks again to Jeb Campbell for finding it. New in v0.2.2 (2001/8/24) ------------------------- Fixed bug in remote creation of special files and symlinks (thanks to Jeb Campbell for finding it). Fixed another error report. New in v0.2.1 (2001/8/7) ------------------------ Now if rdiff-backup isn't running as root, it doesn't try to change file ownership. Fixed an error report. Stopped flushing an open pipe to fix a race condition on IRIX. New in v0.2 (2001/8/3) ---------------------- rdiff-backup can now operate in a bandwidth efficient manner (a la rsync) using a pipe setup with, for instance, ssh. I was too hasty with the last bug fix and didn't deal with all filenames properly. Maybe this one will work. New in v0.1.1 (2001/8/2) ------------------------- Bug fix: Filenames that may contain spaces, backslashes, and other special characters are quoted now and should be handled correctly. New in v0.1 (2001/7/15) ---------------------- Large portion (majority?) of rdiff-backup was rewritten for v0.1. New version highlights: - No new features! - No speed improvements! It may even be slower... - No bug fixes! (ok maybe a few) However, the new version is much cleaner and better documented. This version should have fewer bugs, and it should be easier to fix any future bugs.