Verify should only operate on changed files in incremental backup

[Padfoot]

This is more of a wishlist request to change or extend the verify function.

Currently, verify will check every file (as if I have done a full backup) rather than just the newly backed up files in an incremental backup.

To me, this seems a waste of processor resources, as presumably, the unchanged files would have been verified on the initial full backup (if users are following a recommended backup regime).

Doing an incremental backup is very fast indeed, yet when I verify afterwards, it takes a very long time as it is not only verifying the increnental changes, but all the already verified files.

May I request the verify option to check the entire backup for a full backup and only the incremental file changes in an incremental backup?

Cheers.

[Aaron Whitehouse (aaron-whitehouse)]

Just to play devil's advocate here, I prefer the current behaviour. I currently have long incremental chains (6 months to 1 year), but I am comfortable that they can restore because I regularly verify that all archives necessary to get my data back can be restored. You are right that in theory these earlier archives should not have changed, but the archive files could be unreadable because of a disk failure, you could have forgotten to verify an earlier incremental that this one depends on or other reasons.

It is also a bit of a challenge in that the verify is currently quite separate to the incremental backup (i.e. you backup and then verify). You could essentially achieve this by finding out which files were backed up in your incremental and then pass these to the --file-to-restore option of verify, but even that isn't quite what you are requesting; as if a file changes then only the diff/delta is stored in the incremental and you may have to restore another full/incremental archive to restore a full copy of the file.