Re: [rdiff-backup-users] "Faking" a history

[Andrew Ferguson]

Niall O Broin wrote:
> I want to transition from an amanda based backup system to an rdiff- 
> back system. However, I would like, if possible to keep the last few  
> months' of history e.g. I'd like to replicate the amanda backups  
> (which are on disk) into rdiff backups.
> 
> My idea is that I would recover the amanda backup of a particular  
> filesystem into say /tmp/fake on machine x and then use rdiff-backup  
> to back that up, telling rdiff backup that this is really /home from  
> machine y, and the date is really whatever.
> 
> Is there any reasonable way of doing this?

I think this might be possible. As far as I can tell, rdiff-backup
doesn't care what your source directory is called (/tmp/fake, /home,
/whatever) -- it will simply take whatever you path you pass to it and
make the target directory look like that, but maintaining incremental
history, of course.

The second piece of this puzzle you need is the option "--current-time"
(which is in the man page). This takes an argument of the number of
seconds since the epoch and uses as the current time instead of
consulting the clock.

So try something like:

<recover backup 1 to /tmp/fake>
rdiff-backup --current-time <time1 in seconds> /tmp/fake /home_backup
<recover backup 2 to /tmp/fake>
rdiff-backup --current-time <time2 in seconds> /tmp/fake /home_backup
<etc>

Then, after a few of those, try:

rdiff-backup --list-increments /home_backup

You should see the current mirror marker and increments from your
backups, set to the correct times.

When you're all done, proceed with "rdiff-backup /home /home_backup"
just like usual.

Andrew

-- 
Andrew Ferguson - address@hidden