Re: rsync like restore

[Colin Percival <cperciva@tarsnap.com>]

On 12/16/13 02:49, Mike Kallies wrote:
> For testing, we'd like to do a weekly automated restore on our standby
> hardware.  The ideal way to do this would be to do an rsync-like
> restore.

Tarsnap really isn't designed for that... :-/

> [snip]
> An rsync-like restore could greatly simplify this kind of test.  Is
> there such a feature?  Is there a different method which people use to
> test their backups which I'm overlooking?

The closest you can get right now is the --keep-newer-files option (which
is actually "keep files which are not older") but that would still download
the entire contents of any files which have changed at all.

I do have an idea for "tarsnap -x --sync" functionality which would reuse
the deduplication mechanism to identify parts of an existing file so that
they would not need to be downloaded, but that's not going to happen in
the near future.

-- 
Colin Percival
Security Officer Emeritus, FreeBSD | The power to serve
Founder, Tarsnap | www.tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid