Show file history

[aawsome]

I'd like to show some functionality which has been introduced in rustic 0.8.0.

Sometimes you know about a file which is present in your repository and you want to know when this exactly given file has been changed. Basically you want to see the history of this file in the snapshots saved in your repository.

To do so, simply use the --path option of rustic find. This will find the given path in all snapshots. However, by default identical results are shown as (+x) (like in the rustic snapshots output). So, this gives you exactly the history of that file.

Typically, you also know that you can filter out some snapshots by using the path(s) stored in the snapshots, so using a suitable --filter-paths will reduce the search by excluding snapshots which cannot contain that file.

An example call:

$ rustic find --path /home/alex/.config/mc/ini --filter-paths /home
[00:00:01] reading index...               ████████████████████████████████████████        451/451

searching in snapshots group (host [myhost], label [], paths [/home])...
found in 03521ca4 from 2022-06-11 06:29:55
-rw-r--r--     alex     alex      4036 28 Mar 07:22 "/home/alex/.config/mc/ini" 
found in 772fc402 from 2022-06-30 23:30:21 (+1)
-rw-r--r--     alex     alex      4036 13 Jun 08:19 "/home/alex/.config/mc/ini" 
found in dd4d75e2 from 2022-08-31 23:30:33 (+16)
-rw-r--r--     alex     alex      4036 12 Aug 12:55 "/home/alex/.config/mc/ini" 
found in b31f134e from 2023-10-29 23:30:20 (+230)
-rw-r--r--     alex     alex      4078 24 Oct 06:41 "/home/alex/.config/mc/ini" 
found in bfacf88a from 2024-01-29 09:30:27 (+256)
-rw-r--r--     alex     alex      4078 28 Jan 23:32 "/home/alex/.config/mc/ini" 
found in fef232e8 from 2024-04-23 23:30:52 (+432)
-rw-r--r--     alex     alex      4078 15 Apr 12:18 "/home/alex/.config/mc/ini" 

This shows that the given file exists in quite some snapshots - we exactly get the snapshots where the file content changed.

[simonsan]

Would be nice, to add this to the docs actually, e.g. here: https://github.com/rustic-rs/docs/tree/main/src/commands/misc

As a use case for finding things.

Ref.: rustic-rs/docs#83

[simonsan]

Online: https://rustic.cli.rs/docs/commands/misc/file_history.html

[nickchomey]

I don't understand what this is doing/showing. If you make a doc on it, can you please provide more detail on how to interpret and use the output?

I don't know what +x means, or what differs/remains the same between each result.

[nickchomey]

Thanks! So, with your original example

found in 03521ca4 from 2022-06-11 06:29:55
-rw-r--r--     alex     alex      4036 28 Mar 07:22 "/home/alex/.config/mc/ini" 
found in 772fc402 from 2022-06-30 23:30:21 (+1)
-rw-r--r--     alex     alex      4036 13 Jun 08:19 "/home/alex/.config/mc/ini" 
found in dd4d75e2 from 2022-08-31 23:30:33 (+16)
-rw-r--r--     alex     alex      4036 12 Aug 12:55 "/home/alex/.config/mc/ini" 
found in b31f134e from 2023-10-29 23:30:20 (+230)
-rw-r--r--     alex     alex      4078 24 Oct 06:41 "/home/alex/.config/mc/ini" 
found in bfacf88a from 2024-01-29 09:30:27 (+256)
-rw-r--r--     alex     alex      4078 28 Jan 23:32 "/home/alex/.config/mc/ini" 
found in fef232e8 from 2024-04-23 23:30:52 (+432)
-rw-r--r--     alex     alex      4078 15 Apr 12:18 "/home/alex/.config/mc/ini"

this means that the file was

• created on 28 Mar (of which year? it doesnt show, presumably because ls doesnt show it by default. Perhaps a standard dd/mm/yyyy can be used in both places. eg. ls -l --time-style=+%d/%m/%Y?)
• added to the repo on 2022-06-11
• changed on 13 Jun and snapshotted 30 Jun, didnt change for the next 1 snapshot
• changed 12 Aug, snapshotted 2022-08-31 and it didnt change for 16 snapshots
• etc...

Is that correct?

[aawsome]

exactly! Thanks for the hint of the missing year; I opened #1239

[aawsome]

Just a note: Of course there could have be more changes of this file in-between snapshots. But rustic can only detect changes between the snapshot times..

[nickchomey]

Great, thanks for clarifying/confirming!

And, yes, of course there could have been uncaptured changes between snapshots. We'd need some real-time file watcher sync thing (eg like onedrive does on windows) with versioning. I doubt that's in the scope of rustic.

[simonsan]

Great, thanks for clarifying/confirming!

And, yes, of course there could have been uncaptured changes between snapshots. We'd need some real-time file watcher sync thing (eg like onedrive does on windows) with versioning. I doubt that's in the scope of rustic.

You could do that with a script and https://github.com/watchexec/watchexec/ for example