[rdiff-backup-users] Newbie question: Restore target already exists

[Sherrard Burton]

I'm sorry if this question has already been answered, but I couldn't
find what I was looking for in either of the archives.

Is there a way to force a restore into a directory, or down a set of
directories that already exist?

We are trying to transition to rdiff-backup to backup our users home
directories. A large percentage of the restorations that we do involve
recovering deleted mail messages that cover a certain period of time.
For example, we had a user that lost all mail from yesterday back to
five days ago. The mail is stored by qmail in /u/jdoe/Maildir/new/ when
it arrives then moved to /u/jdoe/Maildir/cur/ when mail is checked, and
it stays there until it is deleted. I would like to simply run a restore
for each time point, 1D, 2D, ..., 5D to a common directory so that I can
then do 

mv /tmp/restore/u/jdoe/Maildir/new/* /u/jdoe/Maildir/new/

and I will have restored all mail covered by the last 5 days backups.

The problem is that after I run

rdiff-backup  -r 1D --include '/tmp/restore/u/jdoe/Maildir/new/'
--exclude '**' /u-backup/ /tmp/restore/

and then 

rdiff-backup  -r 2D --include '/tmp/restore/u/jdoe/Maildir/new/'
--exclude '**' /u-backup/ /tmp/restore/

I get 

Fatal Error: Restore target /tmp/restore/u/ already exists, and will not
be overwritten.

Is there an easy way to force rdiff-backup to restore these files, or
some other way to implement the resotration so that no matter what the
range of restorations is, 2, 5, 10 days, we can easily restore a block
of mail messages or other files?