path: root/rdiff-backup/rdiff-backup.1

.TH RDIFF-BACKUP 1 "AUGUST 2001" "Version 0.2.1" "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 }
.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 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
.BI "--chars-to-quote " chars
If this option is set, any characters in
.I chars
present in filenames on the source side will be quoted on the
destination side, so that they do not appear in filenames on the
remote side.  See
.B --quoting-char
and
.BR --windows-mode .
.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
.BI "--current-time " seconds
This option is useful mainly for testing.  If set, rdiff-backup will
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
.BI "--exclude-filelist " filename
Excludes the files listed in 
.I filename
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-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, fifos, sockets, and symlinks.
.TP
.B --force
Authorize the updating or overwriting of a destination path.
rdiff-backup will generally tell you if it needs this.
.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.  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
.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
.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
.B --no-change-dir-inc-perms
Do not change the permissions of the directory increments to match the
directories they represent.  This option may be required on file
systems where regular files cannot have their sticky bit set.
.TP
.B --no-compare-inode
This relative esoteric option prevents rdiff-backup from flagging a
file as changed when its inode changes.  This option may be useful if
you are backing up two different directories to the same rdiff-backup
destination directory.  The downside is that hard link information may
get messed up, as the metadata file may no longer have the correct
inode information.
.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 is
"(?i).*\\.(gz|z|bz|bz2|tgz|zip|rpm|deb|jpg|gif|png|jp2|mp3|ogg|avi|wmv|mpeg|mpg|rm|mov)$"
.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.  Note that because
metadata is written to a separate file, hard link information will not
be lost even if the --no-hard-links option is given (however, mirror
files will not be linked).  If many hard-linked files are present,
this option can drastically decrease memory usage.
.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 --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 "--quoting-char " char
Use the specified character for quoting characters specified to be
escaped by the
.B --chars-to-quote
option.  The default is the semicolon ";".  See also
.BR --windows-mode .
.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 " command
This command has been depreciated as of version 0.4.1.  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 "--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.  If you want to, for instance, backup a directory and
remove old files in it, you must run rdiff-backup twice.

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 "--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
.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 "-V, --version"
Print the current version and exit
.TP
.B --windows-mode
This option quotes characters not allowable on windows, and does not
try to preserve ownership, hardlinks, or permissions on the
destination side.  It is appropriate when backing up a normal unix
file system to a windows one such as VFS, or a file system with
similar limitations.  Because metadata is stored in a separate regular
file, this option does not prevent all data from being restored.
.TP
.B --windows-restore
This option turns on windows quoting, but does not disable
permissions, hard linking, or ownership.  Use this when restoring from
an rdiff-backup directory on a windows file system to a unix file
system.

.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.<time>.dir /usr/local.old
.PP
.RE
would also restore the file as desired.
.PP
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 -l/--list-increments, and then specify exact times into
-r/--restore-as-of.

.SH 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
http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime.  Basically they look like
"2001-07-15T04:09:38-07:00", which means what it looks like.  The
"-07:00" section means the time zone is 7 hours behind UTC.
.PP
Secondly, the
.BI -r , " --restore-as-of" ", and " --remove-older-than
options take a time string, which can be given in any of several
formats:
.IP 1.
the string "now" (refers to the current time)
.IP 2.
a sequences of digits, like "123456890" (indicating the time in
seconds after the epoch)
.IP 3.
A string like "2002-01-25T07:00:00+02:00" in datetime format 
.IP 4.
An interval, which is a number followed by one of the characters s, m,
h, D, W, M, or Y (indicating seconds, minutes, hourse, 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.
.IP 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.

.SH 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 filename into host_info::pathname.  It then substitutes
host_info into the remote schema, and runs the resulting command,
reading its input and output.
.PP
The default remote schema is 'ssh -C %s rdiff-backup --server' where
host_info is substituted for '%s'.  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,
.RS
rdiff-backup --remote-schema 'cd /usr; %s' foo 'rdiff-backup
--server'::bar
.RE
is basically equivalent to (but slower than)
.RS
rdiff-backup foo /usr/bar
.RE
.PP
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
(if it makes you feel better, I had to type in 8 backslashes to get
that in this man page...).  And finally, to include a literal % in the
string specified by --remote-schema, quote it with another %, as in
%%.

.SH FILE SELECTION
.B rdiff-backup
supports file selection options similar to (but different from)
.BR rsync (1).
When rdiff-backup is run, it searches through the given source
directory and backs up all the files specified by the file selection
system.  The system may appear complicated, but it is supposed to be
flexible and easy-to-use.

The file selection system comprises a number of file
selection conditions, which are set using one of the following command
line options:
.BR --exclude , --exclude-device-files , --exclude-filelist ,
.BR --exclude-globbing-filelist ,
.BR --exclude-filelist-stdin , --exclude-regexp , --exclude-special-files ,
.BR --include ,
.BR --include-filelist , --include-globbing-filelist ,
.BR --include-filelist-stdin ,
and
.BR --include-regexp .
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 to exist in neither the source nor target directories.

For instance,
.PP
.RS
rdiff-backup --include /usr --exclude /usr /usr /backup
.PP
.RE
is exactly the same as
.PP
.RS
rdiff-backup /usr /backup
.PP
.RE
because the include and exclude directives match exactly the same
files, and the
.B --include
comes first, giving it precedence.  Similarly,
.PP
.RS
rdiff-backup --include /usr/local/bin --exclude /usr/local /usr /backup
.PP
.RE
would backup the /usr/local/bin directory (and its contents), but not
/usr/local/doc.

The
.BR include ,
.BR exclude ,
.BR include-globbing-filelist ,
and
.B exclude-globbing-filelist
options accept
.IR "extended shell globbing patterns" .
These patterns can contain the special patterns
.BR * ,
.BR ** ,
.BR ? ,
and
.BR [...] .
As in a normal shell,
.B *
can be expanded to any string of characters not containing "/",
.B ?
expands to any character except "/", and
.B [...]
expands to a single character of those characters specified (ranges
are acceptable).  The new special pattern,
.BR ** ,
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.

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
.BI "--exclude " pattern
option matches a file iff:
.TP
.B 1.
.I pattern
can be expanded into the file's filename, or
.TP
.B 2.
the file is inside a directory matched by the option.
.PP
.RE
Conversely,
.BI "--include " pattern
matches a file iff:
.TP
.B 1.
.I pattern
can be expanded into the file's filename,
.TP
.B 2.
the file is inside a directory matched by the option, or
.TP
.B 3.
the file is a directory which contains a file matched by the option.
.PP
.RE
For example,
.PP
.RS
.B --exclude
/usr/local
.PP
.RE
matches /usr/local, /usr/local/lib, and /usr/local/lib/netscape.  It
is the same as --exclude /usr/local --exclude '/usr/local/**'.
.PP
.RS
.B --include
/usr/local
.PP
.RE
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,
.PP
.RS
.B --include
ignorecase:'/usr/[a-z0-9]foo/*/**.py'
.PP
.RE
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
.BR --include-filelist ,
.BR --exclude-filelist ,
.BR --include-filelist-stdin ,
and
.B --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
.I extended shell patterns
are, with a few exceptions:
.TP
.B 1.
Globbing patterns like
.BR * ,
.BR ** ,
.BR ? ,
and
.B [...]
are not expanded.
.TP
.B 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.
.TP
.B 3.
Lines starting with "+ " are interpreted as include directives, even
if found in a filelist referenced by
.BR --exclude-filelist .
Similarly, lines starting with "- " exclude files even if they are
found within an include filelist.

.RE
For example, if the file "list.txt" contains the lines:

.RS
/usr/local
.RE
.RS
- /usr/local/doc
.RE
.RS
/usr/local/bin
.RE
.RS
+ /var
.RE
.RS
- /var

.RE
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
.B --include-globbing-filelist
and
.B --exclude-globbing-filelist
options also specify filelists, but each line in the filelist will be
interpreted as a globbing pattern the way
.B --include
and
.B --exclude
options are interpreted (although "+ " and "- " prefixing is still
allowed).  For instance, if the file "globbing-list.txt" contains the
lines:

.RE
.RS
dir/foo
.RE
.RS
+ dir/bar
.RE
.RS
- **

.RE
Then "--include-globbing-filelist globbing-list.txt" would be exactly
the same as specifying "--include dir/foo --include dir/bar --exclude **"
on the command line.

Finally, the
.B --include-regexp
and
.B --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
.B --include
and
.B --exclude
options, the regular expression options don't match files containing
or contained in matched files.  So for instance
.PP
.RS
--include '[0-9]{7}(?!foo)'
.PP
.RE
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.

.SH STATISTICS

Every session rdiff-backup saves various statistics into two files,
the session statistics file at
rdiff-backup-data/session_statistics.<time>.data and the directory
statistics file at rdiff-backup-data/directory_statistics.<time>.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
directory statistics file is more compact (and slightly less readable)
but describes every directory backed up.  It also may be compressed to
save space.

Statistics related options include
.B --print-statistics
and
.BR --null-separator .

Also, 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 diplayed to
stdout or stderr, although this can be changed with the
.B --terminal-verbosity
option.

The log file is not compressed and can become quite large if
rdiff-backup is run with high verbosity.

.SH EXIT STATUS

If rdiff-backup finishes successfully, the exit status will be 0.  If
there is an error, it will be non-zero (usually 1, but don't depend on
this specific value).  When setting up rdiff-backup to run
automatically (as from
.BR cron (8)
or similar) it is probably a good idea to check the exit code.

.SH BUGS
rdiff-backup uses the shell command
.BR mknod (1)
to backup device files (e.g. /dev/ttyS0), so device files won't be
handled correctly on systems with non-standard mknod syntax.
.PP
Files whose names are close to the maximum length (e.g. 235 chars if
the maximum is 255) may be skipped because the filenames of related
increment files would be too long.
.PP
The gzip library in versions 2.2 and earlier of python (but fixed in
2.3a1) has trouble producing files over 2GB in length.  This bug will
prevent rdiff-backup from producing large compressed increments
(snapshots or diffs).  A workaround is to disable compression for
large uncompressable files.

.SH AUTHOR
Ben Escoto <bescoto@stanford.edu>
.PP
Feel free to ask me questions or send me bug reports, but you may want to see the web page, mentioned below, first.

.SH SEE ALSO
.BR python (1),
.BR rdiff (1),
.BR rsync (1),
.BR ssh (1).
The main rdiff-backup web page is at
.IR http://rdiff-backup.stanford.edu/ .
It has more information, links to the mailing list and CVS, etc.