Re: Started using rdiff-backup again and it deleted previous directories/files

[EricZolf]

Hi Matthew, 

rdiff-backup wouldn't destroy the directory it's doing a backup to,  unless it 
told you that it doesn't recognise the target directory as backup repository, 
and you called it with --force, but then it would still have the target 
directory,  and rdiff-backup-data in it. If you don't have such a directory 
anywhere, then I have absolutely no clue what you did. 
If you have such a directory,  then it should contain a backup.log file, which 
should contain more information. Together with the log and the exact commands 
you used (there is the history command for this), you should create an issue.

KR, Eric

On February 20, 2023 9:19:11 PM UTC, Matthew Glassman via Any discussion of 
rdiff-backup <rdiff-backup-users@nongnu.org> wrote:
>Hello group,
>
>I figured this was a better place to get help than posting to the GitHub 
>issues location.  
>
>Had been using rdiff-backups from around late 2021 to early 2022 while I was 
>displaced due to renovations.  I was using it based on an article here 
>https://opensource.com/life/16/3/turn-your-old-raspberry-pi-automatic-backup-server
>And I got it working as needed though cron never really worked the way it was 
>supposed to... I suppose because my local source (running Ubuntu) and my 
>remote source (running Raspbian) had different versions of rdiff-backup on it 
>or something was funky in the ssh pipeline. 
>
>Anyways, fast foward to this week, I updated my Python on both machines 3.11.2 
>on the local and 3.10.x I believe on the remote.  Both machines are running 
>rdiff-backup 2.2.3 and both were installed using pip3 as I couldn't get Ubuntu 
>to update to same version using apt.
>
>I wanted rdiff-backup to just backup the one file I had added to my 
>/home/<user>/Videos  directory on my local to the remote which already had a 
>Videos directory in the rdiff location I had previously used.  I was debugging 
>a bit with rdiff until I finally got it running without an error or some 
>deprecation remark using the following 
>rdiff-backup -v8 backup /home/<user>/Videos <Remote>::<path to rdiff backup 
>directory>/Videos/  (or something to that) and hit enter
>
>It started firing off all these messages too quick for me to see and too late 
>for me to be able to try to comprehend.  Regardless, in the morning, it was 
>still trying to process things but wasn't moving forward that I could tell and 
>so I checked on my remote and it had deleted and replaced everything.. there 
>wasn't even a /Videos directory there anymore.  
>
>So two questions
>1. Is it possible to get the original files that were on the remote back on 
>the remote prior to this snafu  (will the rdiff-backup-regress work?)2. What 
>would have caused this since I didn't tell it to delete anything?  
>
>Regards,
>Matthew