.TH RDIFF-BACKUP 1 "MARCH 2009" "Version 1.3.3" "User Manuals" \" -*- nroff -*- .SH NAME rdiff-backup \- local/remote mirror and incremental backup .SH SYNOPSIS .B rdiff-backup .BI [ options ] .BI [[[ user@ ] host1.foo ]:: source_directory ] .BI [[[ user@ ] host2.foo ]:: destination_directory ] .B rdiff-backup .B {{ \-l | \-\-list-increments } .BI "| \-\-remove-older-than " time_interval .BI "| \-\-list-at-time " time .BI "| \-\-list-changed-since " time .B "| \-\-list-increment-sizes " .B "| \-\-verify" .BI "| \-\-verify-at-time " time } .BI [[[ user@ ] host2.foo ]:: destination_directory ] .B rdiff-backup \-\-calculate-average .I statfile1 statfile2 ... .B rdiff-backup \-\-test-server .BI [ user1 ] @host1.net1 :: path .BI [[ user2 ] @host2.net2 :: path ] .I ... .SH DESCRIPTION .B rdiff-backup is a script, written in .BR 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 subdirectory 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. .B rdiff-backup can also operate in a bandwidth efficient manner over a pipe, like .BR 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 .B rdiff-backup is installed in the user's PATH on the remote system. For information on other options, see the section on .B REMOTE OPERATION. Note that you .B 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.html file included in the rdiff-backup distribution. .SH OPTIONS .TP .B \-b, \-\-backup-mode Force backup mode even if first argument appears to be an increment or mirror file. .TP .B \-\-calculate-average Enter calculate average mode. The arguments should be a number of statistics files. rdiff-backup will print the average of the listed statistics files and exit. .TP .B \-\-carbonfile Enable backup of MacOS X carbonfile information. .TP .B \-\-check-destination-dir If an rdiff-backup session fails, running rdiff-backup with this option on the destination dir will undo the failed directory. This happens automatically if you attempt to back up to a directory and the last backup failed. .TP .B \-\-compare This is equivalent to .BI '\-\-compare-at-time " now" ' .TP .BI "\-\-compare-at-time " time 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. This only compares metadata, in the same way rdiff-backup decides whether a file has changed. .TP .B \-\-compare-full This is equivalent to .BI '\-\-compare-full-at-time " now" ' .TP .BI "\-\-compare-full-at-time " time Compare a directory with the backup set at the given time. To compare regular files, 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 option. .TP .B \-\-compare-hash This is equivalent to .BI '\-\-compare-hash-at-time " now" ' .TP .BI "\-\-compare-hash-at-time " time Compare a directory with the backup set at the given time. Regular files will be compared by computing their SHA1 digest on the source side and comparing it to the digest recorded in the metadata. .TP .B \-\-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. .TP .BI "\-\-current-time " seconds 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. .TP .BI "\-\-exclude " shell_pattern Exclude the file or files matched by .IR shell_pattern . If a directory is matched, then files under that directory will also be matched. See the .B FILE SELECTION section for more information. .TP .B "\-\-exclude-device-files" Exclude all device files. This can be useful for security/permissions reasons or if rdiff-backup is not handling device files correctly. .TP .B "\-\-exclude-fifos" Exclude all fifo files. .TP .BI "\-\-exclude-filelist " filename Excludes the files listed in .IR filename . If .I filename is handwritten you probably want .B \-\-exclude-globbing-filelist instead. See the .B FILE SELECTION section for more information. .TP .B \-\-exclude-filelist-stdin Like .B \-\-exclude-filelist, but the list of files will be read from standard input. See the .B FILE SELECTION section for more information. .TP .BR "\-\-exclude-globbing-filelist " filename Like .B \-\-exclude-filelist but each line of the filelist will be interpreted according to the same rules as .B \-\-include and .B \-\-exclude. .TP .B \-\-exclude-globbing-filelist-stdin Like .BR \-\-exclude-globbing-filelist , but the list of files will be read from standard input. .TP .B \-\-exclude-other-filesystems Exclude files on file systems (identified by device number) other than the file system the root of the source directory is on. .TP .BI "\-\-exclude-regexp " regexp Exclude files matching the given regexp. Unlike the .B \-\-exclude option, this option does not match files in a directory it matches. See the .B FILE SELECTION section for more information. .TP .B \-\-exclude-special-files Exclude all device files, fifo files, socket files, and symbolic links. .TP .B "\-\-exclude-sockets" Exclude all socket files. .TP .B "\-\-exclude-symbolic-links" Exclude all symbolic links. This option is automatically enabled if the backup source is running on native Windows to avoid backing-up NTFS reparse points. .TP .BI "\-\-exclude-if-present " filename Exclude directories if .IR filename is present. This option needs to come before any other include or exclude options. .TP .B \-\-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 .BR \-\-remove-older-than ). rdiff-backup will generally tell you if it needs this. .BR WARNING: 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. .TP .BI "\-\-group-mapping-file " filename Map group names and ids according the the group mapping file .IR filename . See the .B USERS AND GROUPS section for more information. .TP .BI "\-\-include " shell_pattern Similar to .B \-\-exclude but include matched files instead. Unlike .BR \-\-exclude , this option will also match parent directories of matched files (although not necessarily their contents). See the .B FILE SELECTION section for more information. .TP .BI "\-\-include-filelist " filename Like .BR \-\-exclude-filelist , but include the listed files instead. If .I filename is handwritten you probably want .B \-\-include-globbing-filelist instead. See the .B FILE SELECTION section for more information. .TP .B \-\-include-filelist-stdin Like .BR \-\-include-filelist , but read the list of included files from standard input. .TP .BI "\-\-include-globbing-filelist " filename Like .B \-\-include-filelist but each line of the filelist will be interpreted according to the same rules as .B \-\-include and .B \-\-exclude. .TP .B \-\-include-globbing-filelist-stdin Like .BR \-\-include-globbing-filelist , but the list of files will be read from standard input. .TP .BI "\-\-include-regexp " regexp Include files matching the regular expression .IR regexp . Only files explicitly matched by .I regexp will be included by this option. See the .B FILE SELECTION section for more information. .TP .B \-\-include-special-files Include all device files, fifo files, socket files, and symbolic links. .TP .B \-\-include-symbolic-links Include all symbolic links. .TP .BI "\-\-list-at-time " 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. .TP .BI "\-\-list-changed-since " time List the files that have changed in the destination directory since the given time. See .B TIME FORMATS for the format of .IR 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. .TP .B "-l, \-\-list-increments" List the number and date of partial incremental backups contained in the specified destination directory. No backup or restore will take place if this option is given. .TP .B \-\-list-increment-sizes List the total size of all the increment and mirror files by time. This may be helpful in deciding how many increments to keep, and when to \-\-remove-older-than. Specifying a subdirectory is allowable; then only the sizes of the mirror and increments pertaining to that subdirectory will be listed. .TP .BI "\-\-max-file-size " size Exclude files that are larger than the given size in bytes .TP .BI "\-\-min-file-size " size Exclude files that are smaller than the given size in bytes .TP .B \-\-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. .TP .B \-\-no-acls No Access Control Lists - disable backup of ACLs .TP .B \-\-no-carbonfile Disable backup of MacOS X carbonfile information .TP .B \-\-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. .TP .B \-\-no-compression 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. .TP .B "\-\-no-compression-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 in Globals.py. .TP .B \-\-no-eas No Extended Attributes support - disable backup of EAs. .TP .B \-\-no-file-statistics This will 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. .TP .BI \-\-no-hard-links Don't replicate hard links on destination side. If many hard-linked files are present, this option can drastically decrease memory usage. This option is enabled by default if the backup source or restore destination is running on native Windows. .TP .B \-\-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 directory statistics file. .TP .B \-\-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 .B \-l or .B \-\-list-increments switches, where the time will be given in seconds since the epoch. .TP .B \-\-override-chars-to-quote 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 override this behavior, you need to specify this option. .TP .B \-\-preserve-numerical-ids If set, rdiff-backup will preserve uids/gids instead of trying to preserve unames and gnames. See the .B USERS AND GROUPS section for more information. .TP .B \-\-print-statistics If set, summary statistics will be printed after a successful backup. If not set, this information will still be available from the session statistics file. See the .B STATISTICS section for more information. .TP .BI "\-r, \-\-restore-as-of " restore_time Restore the specified directory as it was as of .IR restore_time . See the .B TIME FORMATS section for more information on the format of .IR restore_time , and see the .B RESTORING section for more information on restoring. .TP .BI "\-\-remote-cmd " cmd Deprecated. Please use \-\-remote-schema instead .TP .BI "\-\-remote-schema " schema 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 .B REMOTE OPERATION section for more information. .TP .BI "\-\-remote-tempdir " path Adds the \-\-tempdir option with argument .I path when invoking remote instances of rdiff-backup. .TP .BI "\-\-remove-older-than " time_spec Remove the incremental backup information in the destination directory that has been around longer than the given time. .I time_spec can be either an absolute time, like "2002-01-04", or a time interval. The time interval is an integer followed by the character s, m, h, D, W, M, or Y, indicating seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, or years respectively, or a number of these concatenated. For example, 32m means 32 minutes, and 3W2D10h7s means 3 weeks, 2 days, 10 hours, and 7 seconds. In this context, a month means 30 days, a year is 365 days, and a day is always 86400 seconds. rdiff-backup cannot remove-older-than and back up or restore in a single session. In order to both backup a directory and remove old files in it, you must run rdiff-backup twice. 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 .B \-\-force option (rdiff-backup will tell you if .B \-\-force 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-older-than 10D today, no trace of that file would remain. Finally, file selection options such as \-\-include and \-\-exclude don't affect \-\-remove-older-than. .TP .BI "\-\-restrict " path Require that all file access be inside the given path. This switch, and the following two, are intended to be used with the \-\-server switch to provide a bit more protection when doing automated remote backups. They are .B 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-read-only. .TP .BI "\-\-restrict-read-only " path Like .BR \-\-restrict , but also reject all write requests. .TP .BI "\-\-restrict-update-only " path Like .BR \-\-restrict , but only allow writes as part of an incremental backup. Requests for other types of writes (for instance, deleting .IR path ) will be rejected. .TP .B \-\-server Enter server mode (not to be invoked directly, but instead used by another rdiff-backup process on a remote computer). .TP .B \-\-ssh-no-compression When running ssh, do not use the \-C option to enable compression. .B \-\-ssh-no-compression is ignored if you specify a new schema using .B \-\-remote-schema. .TP .BI "\-\-tempdir " path 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. .TP .BI "\-\-terminal-verbosity " [0-9] Select which messages will be displayed to the terminal. If missing the level defaults to the verbosity level. .TP .B \-\-test-server Test for the presence of a compatible rdiff-backup server as specified in the following host::filename argument(s). The filename section will be ignored. .TP .B \-\-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. .TP .BI "\-\-user-mapping-file " filename Map user names and ids according to the user mapping file .IR filename . See the .B USERS AND GROUPS section for more information. .TP .BI \-v [0-9] ", \-\-verbosity " [0-9] 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. .TP .B \-\-verify This is short for .BI \-\-verify-at-time " now" .TP .BI \-\-verify-at-time " now" 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. .TP .B "-V, \-\-version" Print the current version and exit .SH RESTORING There are two ways to tell rdiff-backup to restore a file or directory. Firstly, you can run rdiff-backup on a mirror file and use the .B \-r or .B \-\-restore-as-of options. Secondly, you can run it on an increment file. .PP For example, suppose in the past you have run: .PP .RS rdiff-backup /usr /usr.backup .PP .RE 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. .PP One way to do this is to run: .PP .RS rdiff-backup \-r 3D /usr.backup/local /usr/local.old .PP .RE where above the "3D" means 3 days (for other ways to specify the time, see the .B TIME FORMATS section). The /usr.backup/local directory was selected, because that is the directory containing the current version of /usr/local. .PP Note that the option to .B \-\-restore-as-of always specifies an exact time. (So "3D" refers to the instant 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. .PP 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: .PP .RS rdiff-backup /backup/rdiff-backup-data/increments/usr/local.