Home / server / Questions / 345056
Accepted
Paul
Asked: 2011-12-30 07:11:23 +0800 CST

Duplicity: How to list versions of a file?

  • 772

Using Duplicity I can make an incremental, efficient backup to an untrusted remote storage. This works fine and I can restore files at a specific point in time (or the next backup after that).

Well now I want to know when in the history of all the backups did a specific file change. File change timestamp and size along with the backup timestamps would be sufficient.

Any way to do that with duplicity?

EDIT: I should clarify that I want to see every change/version to that file and not only the last, e.g. when it was first introduced, when it was change. That might be at multiple backup incremental backups.

backup duplicity

5 Answers

  1. Since version 0.7.03 of Duplicity it is possible to list the revisions that a file has changed in:

    duplicity collection-status --file-changed 'filename' 'remote-url'
    • 7
  2. Best Answer

    There was an answer on the mailing list by Edgar Soldin:

    no, you can currently list all backed up versions. duplicity will not tell you when they were changed. this could however be implemented as duplicity internally keeps track of that.

    ede/duply.net

    So in essence: It is not possible with vanilla duplicity now, but the data is in duplicity metadata.

    • 5

  3. YES, it is possible to do this by getting a list of all of the files in each of the snapshots that duplicity takes (i.e. the first full backup and every incremental) and then compare the file lists and look for the specific file you are concerned with.

    While it will not show every change to the file unless the file changes less frequently than you make duplicity copies, it will show each state of the file at each backup point.

    I wrote a shell script to do this.

    • 4

  4. You might try dumping the full list of files, then searching that list for the file in question:

    duplicity list-current-files url > /path/to/file-list.txt
grep filename /path/to/file-list.txt

    This command is poorly documented, but each line in the file has a date that appears to be last modified time.

    • 3 
  5. duplicity list-current-files --time now "${DEST}" > /tmp/today
duplicity list-current-files --time 1D "${DEST}" > /tmp/yesterday
grep -Fxvf /tmp/{today,yesterday}
    • 0