A tool that applies only differences between .tar files.
Imagine it as a rdiff but for being able to process tar files directly.
- Seems mostly fine in simple tests that I've done
- DO NOT use a directory already filled with files
- HAS NOT BEEN THOUGHLY TESTED YET (DONT RELY ON THIS YET)
- DO NOT change ignore rules after the first backup or you'll end up with erroneous files afterwards.
- THERE IS NO FILE HEADER FOR THE FOLDER STATE AND IT WILL BE BROKEN IN AN FUTURE UPDATE.
- I only just got to some rust concepts, so the average rustacian may scream at me for the horrors that I've brought to their programming language.
This exists because some cloud service/webhosting providers don't offer SSH
or any other sane means of transfering backups across servers. Instead, they
just offer .tar.gz backups that are pain to deal with.
Why are they a pain?
Glad you've asked. On every backup I have to extract the entire tar archive just so I'm able to notice what files were actually changed. This is extremely wasteful as I have to waste my precious disk write cycles on this pointless task.
So instead I wrote this. This can completely work in UNIX pipes, which makes it extremely flexible.
The tool is designed to apply partial updates of your target folder using the
.tar files provided by your web host. It achieves this by reading the tar
file on the fly, calculating hashes and keeping track of the file structure
inside of a state file.
Any differences of the state compared to the previous one is followed up by a write to said folder. As long as changes remain small, it will be able to apply changes using the as least disk writes as reasonably achieveable.
The state file is then further compressed for more savings.
- Install rust.
cargo run.- The rest is self-explanitory.