Re: changed bits -- details

[Colin Percival <cperciva@tarsnap.com>]

Robert Clemens wrote:
> Is there anyway to create a listing or fetch a listing of not the
> archive contents but the changed bits being uploaded.

Not at the moment.

This is a rather complicated problem, due to the internal mechanism of how
tarsnap operates -- there's high-level code which looks at bits on disk and
builds an archive, and there's lower-level code which takes an archive and
figures out how to store it efficiently, but there's only a rather small
amount of interaction between the two layers.  In some cases there won't be
a clear answer as to "which file" is responsible for a block of data, due
to blocks of data appearing in two or more files, small files being packed
together into a single block, metadata (file names, permissions, etc.), and
internal tarsnap overhead.

-- 
Colin Percival
Security Officer, FreeBSD | freebsd.org | The power to serve
Founder / author, Tarsnap | tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid