[rdiff-backup-users] Merge old backup stages

[bb]

Hello!

This is the first time I read and refer to this mailing list, so if this
is an old topic for you... sorry :-)
I use rdiff-backup as my main backup tool in private (Laptop), public
(Server) and profession and love it.

One thing I always wondered, though, is whether there is a way to
"condense" old backup stages to "thin them out".
For example:
My server prepares daily (or nightly ;) ) backups. This is cool, because
if I do something stupid, I only loose one day (compared to weekly
backups, etc).
On the other hand, for backups that were made weeks or even months ago,
I do not need daily resolution. A perfect backup timeline for me would
e.g. be the following:

0 to 1 month(s): daily
1 to 3 month(s): weekly
3 to 12 month(s): monthly
...and so on...

Obviously this is scriptable by restoring the snapshots of the relevant
(daily and later weekly, monthly,...) timestamps and rdiff-backup them
to a new location, but this seems rather tedious and inefficient. For
somebody with more insight into how rdiff-backup works, there might be
an efficient and easy-to-implement solution to this idea (essentially by
merging intermediate deltas).

Is there already a way which I missed or is this really not (yet)
implemented?

Thanks and Cheers,
Bb

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[Robert Nichols]

Post by bb
Hello!
This is the first time I read and refer to this mailing list, so if this
is an old topic for you... sorry :-)
I use rdiff-backup as my main backup tool in private (Laptop), public
(Server) and profession and love it.
One thing I always wondered, though, is whether there is a way to
"condense" old backup stages to "thin them out".

In a word, no. It's something that has been requested before. The
underlying librsync library does not support merging successive
diffs, so the only way to do it would be to reconstruct two versions
of a file and create a new diff from those.

The way I handle it is by keeping entirely separate monthly backup
archives and periodically deleting everything more than a year old
from the daily archives. This has the added advantage that if one
of my archives becomes unrecoverably corrupted, I still haven't
lost everything.