On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 5:29 PM, Nate Eldredge
<address@hidden> wrote:
[I sent this yesterday but it didn't seem to make it to the list. Sorry if this is a duplicate.]
Hello,
I would like to be able to create backups with dates different from the current system date, and am interested in suggestions for adding such a feature.
I have a number of old backups created by hand without duplicity, which I would like to "import" into duplicity for easier management and archival. My plan is to restore each backup and then run duplicity on the unpacked tree. If possible, I would like to have the backup dates recorded by duplicity match the original backup dates. That way I can use duplicity's -t switch to, say, recover a certain file as it was on June 24, 2006.
I don't need to merge with an existing duplicity backup set, and I can import the backups in chronological order, so I shouldn't need anything fancy. I just want duplicity to create a backup exactly as it would if the current date were really September 27, 2005 (for instance). I could temporarily alter the system clock, but that's not very pretty and might disrupt other things on the machine.
I would think it should not be hard to achieve this, but I would welcome any suggestions from anyone familiar with the code base on where would be a good point to inject this. In particular, I noticed that `genstrtotime' has an optional `override_curtime' arg that perhaps was intended for something like this, though as far as I can tell it is not used anywhere. (I am not a python expert so I could be missing something.)