> I think there may be a misunderstanding here.
yes, I was (and probably still somewhat am) misunderstanding how
rdiff-backup works under the hood.
But Adrian's msgs helped me out there (and so does yours, thanks).
> If it's really a problem then you could just delete the
rdiff-backup-data
> directory and backup with --force next time, which removes all older
> increments but does avoid the need to re-transfer all the data.
ah ha, that's a very useful technique to know (thanks!), because before
I had (once or twice) just plain been gunning all the data on the backup
disk (rm -rf *), and then doing a backup (which took forever -- 170+ GB
over usb2). Plus my fear of having that window of time where my source
files weren't backed up...
=JeffH