The target directory ends up a copy of the source directory, but extra reverse diffs are stored in a special subdirectory of that target directory, so you can still recover files lost some time ago.
The idea is to combine the best features of a mirror and an incremental backup. rdiff-backup also preserves subdirectories, hard links, dev files, permissions, uid/gid ownership, modification times, extended attributes, acls, and resource forks.
Features of rdiff-backup
- Easy to use
- Creates mirror
- Keeps increments
- Preserves all information
- Space efficient
- Bandwidth efficient
- Transparent data format
- Filesystem feature autodetection
- Mac OS X resource fork support
- ACL and EA support
- Keeps statistics
