Re: Re[4]: [rdiff-backup-users] Verify times increasing

[Daniel Miller]

On Nov 24, 2009, at 3:44 PM, address@hidden wrote:

> I'm not sure what you're doing with your --verify...
>
> It *sounds* like you want a full CRC style check of the *current*
> files after the backup is complete. (i.e. File X gets updated with a
> delta, and you want to verify that file X is the same both on the
> source and destination locations/drives.)

Yes, although it's more of an internal consistency check within the  
rdiff-backup repository itself. I'm looking for a way to quickly  
verify the integrity my entire rdiff-backup repository.

In my scenario the repository is synced to an external USB drive that  
gets rotated each day (i.e. each day I put yesterday's drive in  
storage and bring a different drive out of storage to use for the next  
backup). I use rsync to transfer my rdiff-backup repository (which  
gets updated daily) to the USB drive. Then I run rdiff-backup --verify- 
at-time to verify that the files on the USB drive are not corrupt. But  
lately this has been taking too long.

Does that make sense?

Yesterday I introduced a utility called yafic into my backup scheme.  
Yafic can do a full-repository verification. This works and it's much  
faster than rdiff-backup's --verify-at-time, but it's complicated to  
setup and I have to ignore all the changes that happen each day when  
rdiff-backup updates the repository. It would be nicer to have this  
kind of verification built-in to rdiff-backup so I wouldn't have to  
filter out all the new delta and metadata files. rdiff-backup knows  
which files were added/changed/deleted and would not report those  
changes like yafic does. With my proposed enhancement, rdiff-backup  
would only report warnings or errors if any part of the repository  
became corrupt.

> If that's the case, I think you already get it. (It's "built-in" to
> RDiff-backup.)

This is good to know. Does this happen during the backup, or only  
during --verify... ? I assume you're talking about something  
equivalent to --verify-at-time 0B ? Of course, this would only verify  
the current mirror.

BTW, is this documented? I'm going to feel stupid if it is, because I  
did not see it when I read the docs (multiple times) for rdiff-backup.

~ Daniel