Re: [rdiff-backup-users] restoring with incremental

[Matthew Flaschen]

Madan Kumar wrote:
> Hi all, I am using rdiff-backup-1.2.8 on WindowsVista and on XP.
> 
> I take backup of a single .dat file from following command: 
> rdiff-backup -b --include "D:/Source/myfile.dat" --exclude "**"
> D:/Source D:/Dest
> 
> I take the backup of this file on irregular interval like sometime
> after 1 day or sometime after 2 days, time period is not fix. So I
> have saveral incrementals there in
> D:/Dest/rdiff-backup-data/increments folder.
> 
> If I need to restore any of these I run the commands by giving time
> string like 1D, 2D..... so on.

Okay...  That should work fine even though you don't backup on regular
intervals.  As the man page says, "Note that the option to
--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."

> If I run following command: rdiff-backup
> D:/dest/rdiff-backup-data/increments/source2gb.dat.2009-04-19T15;05857;05833+05;05830.diff.gz
> D:/rest
> 
> it does nothing but it delete D:/rest folder.

Are you saying D:/rest already exists before you ran the command?  In
general, for a restore like this D:/rest should not exist beforehand.
It will be created by rdiff-backup.  I was about to say rdiff-backup
should warn you you're trying to overwrite a existing dir.  But it looks
like that only happens if there is something in the dir (D:/rest in your
case).   So if you try to restore a file over an empty directory, it
(rdiff-backup 1.2.8) just deletes the directory and creates the file
you're restoring to.  This is fairly unintuitive.

But that still doesn't explain why your dat file isn't restored to
D:/rest (now a file).

> Please guide me so that I can avoid to calculate days to restore the
> incremental backups.

You should be able to do it either with increment files or with days.

Matt Flaschen