Ubuntu Manpage: rdiff-backup - local/remote mirror and incremental backup

Provided by: rdiff-backup_2.2.2-1build1_amd64

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 [--size] 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.

--size
Show the size of each increment being removed. The default is to not show sizes.

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:

• either '[user@]hostname'

• 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

       •   Ben Escoto ben@emerose.org (retired)

       •   Eric Lavarde ewl+rdiffbackup@lavar.de (active)