can one do a diff with a live filesystem

[tshepang]

That is, not comparing snapshots with each other. Would be nice to verify what changed before doing the backup.

[aawsome]

This is not completely possibe. There are two posibilites:

1. The backup command automatically compares the parent snapshot with the live filesystem. If you want to compare with an arbitrary snapshot, you can manually set the parent using the --parent option.

To not backup but still see the changes, you can do a backup dry-run. If you also want to see, which files changed, use log-level debug:
rustic --log-level debug backup -n ...

This however has the limitation that files which do not exist in the live system, but exist in the snapshot, are not shown at all..

2. The restore command also has a dry-run option. It knows which files are different, but so far only shows files which only exist in the live system but not in the snapshot. I think the debug output should be a bit more verbose here...

Does one of these options suit your needs or would you like to have more features?

[tshepang]

I added #365 which enables reading files from the local dir by default and disables comparing metadata by default. @tshepang Can you test that PR if this solves your issue with the marks of seemingly unchanged files?

Am running 0.4.2, and am not sure how to run a diff against live filesystem. Do I have to know the snapshot in advance?

[aawsome]

Yes, you need to know the snapshot you want to compare with the live system. The syntax is rustic diff <SNAPSHOT>:<PATH-IN-SNAP> <LOCAL-PATH>, where <SNAPSHOT> can also be latest.

[tshepang]

That is kool, but note that it ignores the (excluded) glob patterns in rustic config.

[aawsome]

You are right. You can specify exclude options by the command line.
There is so far no specific config support for diff as I'm not sure how to treat it in combination with backup options and backup source options. E.g. should these automatically apply to diff or should we have an extra [diff] section?

[tshepang]

At a minimum, I expected it to ignore files/dirs that I asked to be ignored with glob. Otherwise I'd have to replicate the whole list (with --iglob-file I think).

[aawsome]

Note that with #305 merged, now rustic diff latest[:PATH] <PATH> is possible.

[tshepang]

you are amaze!