Starting with rdiff-backup version 2.1, there have been two separate syntaxes for the command line interface, differentiated by the --new flag. Legacy CLI commands follow the syntax rdiff-backup [options…] [source…] [destination…], while the new CLI uses the syntax rdiff-backup [global options…] action [action-specific options…] [locations…]. The functionality of the commands are the same, but for completeness the examples in this document will be given in both the old and new syntax side-by-side.

Simplest case: backup local directory foo to local directory bar. bar will end up a copy of foo, except it will contain the directory foo/rdiff-backup-data, which will allow rdiff-backup to restore previous states.

Simple remote case: backup directory /some/local-dir to the directory /whatever/remote-dir on the machine hostname.net. It uses ssh to open the necessary pipe to the remote copy of rdiff-backup. Just like the above except one directory is on a remote computer.

This time the source directory is remote and the destination is local. Also, we have specified the username on the remote host (by default ssh will attempt to log you in with the same username you have on the local host).

It is even possible for both the source and destination directories to be on other machines. Below we have also added the -v5 switch for greater verbosity (verbosity settings go from 0 to 9, with 3 as the default), and the --print-statistics switch so some statistics will be displayed at the end (even without this switch, the statistics will still be saved in the rdiff-backup-data directory).

Suppose earlier we have run rdiff-backup foo bar, with both foo and bar local. We accidentally deleted foo/dir and now want to restore it from bar/dir.

That’s right, since rdiff-backup makes a mirror, we can retrieve files using standard commands like cp.

For the rest of the examples in the section, we will assume that the user has backed up with the command rdiff-backup local-dir host.net::/remote-dir. Of course, in all these examples it would be equally possible to have the source being remote and the backup directory local.

In this case we can’t use cp to copy host.net::remote-dir/file to local-dir/file because they are on different machines. We can get rdiff-backup to restore the current version of that file using either of these:

The --restore-as-of (or -r for short) switch (restore action on the new CLI) tells rdiff-backup to restore instead of back up, and the now option indicates the current time.

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.

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.

Finally, we can use rdiff-backup to restore directly from an increment file. Increment files are stored in host.net::/remote-dir/rdiff-backup-data/increments and hold the previous versions of changed files. If you specify one directly:

rdiff-backup will tell from the filename that it is an rdiff-backup increment file and thus enter restore mode. Above the restored version is written to local-dir/file.

Although rdiff-backup tries to save space by only storing file differences, eventually space may run out in the destination directory. rdiff-backup’s --remove-older-than mode can be used to delete older increments.

This section assumes that rdiff-backup has been used in the past to back up to host.net::/remote-dir, but all commands would work locally too, if the hostname were omitted.

This commands deletes all information concerning file versions which have not been current for 2 weeks:

Note that an existing file which hasn’t changed for a year will still be preserved. But a file which was deleted 15 days ago cannot be restored after this command is run.

As when restoring, there are a variety of ways to specify the time. The 20B below tells rdiff-backup to only preserve information from the last 20 rdiff-backup sessions. (nnB syntax is only available in versions after 0.13.1.)

Sometimes you don’t want to back up all files. The various --include and --exclude options can be used to select exactly which files to back up. See the man page for a list of all the options and their definitions.

We have excluded /proc, /tmp, and /mnt. /proc in particular should never be backed up. Also, the source directory happens to be remote.

Multiple include and exclude options take precedence in the order they are given. The following command would back up /usr/local/bin but not /usr/bin.

rdiff-backup uses rsync-like wildcards, where ** matches any path and * matches any path without a / in it. Thus this command:

backs up only the /usr/local and /var directories. The single quotes '' are not part of rdiff-backup and are only used because many shells will expand **.

Here is a more complicated example:

The above command will back up any file ending in txt, even /usr/local/games/pong/scores.txt because that include has highest precedence. The contents of the directory /usr/local/bin will get backed up, but not /usr/share or /usr/local/games/pong.

rdiff-backup can also accept a list of files to be backed up. If the file include-list contains these two lines:

Then this command:

would only back-up the files /var, /usr, /usr/bin, and /usr/bin/gzip, but not /var/log or /usr/bin/gunzip. Note that this differs from the --include option, since --include /var would also match /var/log.

The same file list can contain both include and exclude files. If we create a file called include-list that contains these lines:

Then the following command will do exactly the same thing as the complicated example above.

Above we have used --include-globbing-filelist instead of --include-filelist so that the lines would be interpreted as if they were specified on the command line. Otherwise, for instance, **txt would be considered the name of a file, not a globbing string.

The following examples assume that you have run rdiff-backup in-dir out-dir in the past.

This command finds all new or old files which contain the string frobniz.

rdiff-backup doesn’t obscure the names of files unless the file system doesn’t support its length or certain characters, so often using traditional tools work well.

Either of these equivalent commands lists the times of the available versions of the file out-dir/file. It may be useful if you need to restore an older version of in-dir/file but aren’t sure which one.

The following command lists all the files under out-dir/subdir which has changed in the last 5 days.

This command lists all the files that were present in out-dir/subdir 5 days ago. This includes files that have not changed recently as well as those that have been deleted in the last 5 days.

rdiff-backup writes one statistics file per session to the out-dir/rdiff-backup-data directory. An average of the files can be displayed using the --calculate-average option and specifying the statistics files to use.

If you are having problems connecting to a remote host, the --test-server command may be useful. This command simply verifies that there is a working rdiff-backup server on the remote side.