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Restore individual files?
Authored by: jecwobble on Sep 27, '05 01:13:53PM

Looking at the features page, I cannot tell for certain whether or not you can easily restore one single document from a point in time or if you can only restore the entire folder/directory. Does anyone know for sure?

In the bullet Preserves all information I noticed this statement:

Whether you restore from the mirror directory or from an earlier incremental backup, rdiff-backup will reproduce your files exactly as they were. Files missing at the time of backup will also be missing after the restore.

This leads me to think that you cannot restore a single file.



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Re: Restore individual files?
Authored by: keaka on Sep 27, '05 06:03:40PM
Yes, you can restore single files. For example, I did a backup, then deleted a file, and then did another backup. The file no longer exists in the direct mirror created by rdiff-backup, but it exists in rdiff-backup's version history. Since I know the file existed 30 minutes ago (and I did at least one backup after that while the file existed), I retrieved the file with this command:
rdiff-backup -r 30m /Volumes/external_drive/keaka/Documents/myfile.txt /Users/keaka/Documents/myfile_recovered.txt

I think the bullet you quoted is trying to say that you need to recover a file from a point in time when it actually existed. For example, I deleted the file 10 minutes ago and then performed a backup. So if I try to retrieve the file from 1 minute ago (using rdiff-backup -r 1m), it won't work. But I can retrieve the file from 30 minutes ago.

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Sanity Software: http://keakaj.com/

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Restore individual files?
Authored by: Cameroon on Sep 27, '05 06:06:28PM

I think what that is saying is that if you restore a directory, the directory as it existed at the time of the backup will be recreated.

From the examples:

But the main advantage of rdiff-backup is that it keeps version history. This command restores host.net::/remote-dir/file as it was 10 days ago into a new location /tmp/file.

rdiff-backup -r 10D host.net::/remote-dir/file /tmp/file

Other acceptable time strings include 5m4s (5 minutes and 4 seconds) and 2002-03-05 (March 5th, 2002). For more information, see the TIME FORMATS section of the manual page.

Which leads me to believe just the opposite of your conclusion, as the example explicitly mentions restoring a file.



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