File History

Sometimes you know about a file which is present in your repository and you want to know when this given file has been changed. Basically you want to see the history of this file in the snapshots that have been 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/user/.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--     user     user      4036 28 Mar 07:22 "/home/user/.config/mc/ini" 
found in 772fc402 from 2022-06-30 23:30:21 (+1)
-rw-r--r--     user     user      4036 13 Jun 08:19 "/home/user/.config/mc/ini" 
found in dd4d75e2 from 2022-08-31 23:30:33 (+16)
-rw-r--r--     user     user      4036 12 Aug 12:55 "/home/user/.config/mc/ini" 
found in b31f134e from 2023-10-29 23:30:20 (+230)
-rw-r--r--     user     user      4078 24 Oct 06:41 "/home/user/.config/mc/ini" 
found in bfacf88a from 2024-01-29 09:30:27 (+256)
-rw-r--r--     user     user      4078 28 Jan 23:32 "/home/user/.config/mc/ini" 
found in fef232e8 from 2024-04-23 23:30:52 (+432)
-rw-r--r--     user     user      4078 15 Apr 12:18 "/home/user/.config/mc/ini"

This shows that the given file exists in quite some snapshots - we exactly get the snapshots where the file content changed. So we can easily restore the content of the file from the snapshot we want.

The snapshots are sorted by the snapshot timestamp. Moreover, by default identical nodes are grouped together, this means that

found in dd4d75e2 from 2022-08-31 23:30:33 (+16)
-rw-r--r--     user     user      4036 12 Aug 12:55 "/home/user/.config/mc/ini"

means that this file was found in the shown snapshot dd4d75e2 and in the 16 subsequent snapshots. Moreover, the contents and metadata of it is exactly the same for all 17 snapshots.

Note, this also works for directories - if rustic find groups dirs which were found, the content and metadata of the dir for all contained files and subdirectories are exactly identical.

So, this grouping only shows that there is something different or same. To really see what is different, you have to use rustic diff or maybe even show the contents using rustic dump.