See which files have been removed since the last backup
I accidentally ran the equivalent of rm -rf /
while writing a unit test. I stopped it after a few seconds, and I believed that some files in /run
were gone but I'd interrupted it before it reached /home
, but because the recursive-delete function in question produces no output (not even on error) I couldn't know for sure.
My most recent backup was from just a few hours earlier. So I wanted a way to see what files were present in the backup, but no longer on disk.
The solution I found was to run a second backup, then use borg diff
(via Vorta which exposes its output pretty directly as a tree view) to compare the two. (Happily I haven't lost any files that I care about enough to back up.)
(A related feature I've wanted, which can also be implemented in terms of borg diff
, is “why did my Borg repo suddenly jump by 100 GB today?”. In other words: what are the the large changes between these two archives? I solved this problem by paying to increase my quota on rsync.net and ignoring the problem.)