Can I ask rdiff-backup to ignore metadata-only changes?

user2233709

10/7/23, 3:45 PM

I’m willing to use rdiff-backup to backup the content of a dynamically-modified DNS zone. I have written a simple script that performs an AXFR transfer of the zone to a temporary directory, and then runs rdiff-backup to backup the temporary directory.

It works fine except that, each time I run the script, a new dump is generated, and rdiff-backup detects that the modification time is different, even if the content did not change.

I have a problem with this, since I cannot use rdiff-backup --list-increments to easily detect when the content of the zone was changed. Moreover, each increment takes some space, although very little, but somewhat significant if the script is run every few seconds over a year.

So, is there a way, when I run rdiff-backup -b to tell it that it should not consider a file different if only its timestamps are different?

0 + 2

rdiff-backup

metadata

Andrew Lowther

10/7/23, 10:33 PM

Looks like a feature request exists https://github.com/rdiff-backup/rdiff-backup/issues/465

user2233709

10/8/23, 6:58 AM

Thanks @AndrewLowther for the pointer. I definitely should have looked at the github page (especially the issues) before asking here.

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