[Duplicity-talk] Date override

[Nate Eldredge]

[I sent this yesterday but it didn't seem to make it to the list.  Sorry 
if this is a duplicate.]

Hello,

I would like to be able to create backups with dates different from the current 
system date, and am interested in suggestions for adding such a feature.

I have a number of old backups created by hand without duplicity, which I would 
like to "import" into duplicity for easier management and archival. My plan is 
to restore each backup and then run duplicity on the unpacked tree.  If 
possible, I would like to have the backup dates recorded by duplicity match the 
original backup dates. That way I can use duplicity's -t switch to, say, 
recover a certain file as it was on June 24, 2006.

I don't need to merge with an existing duplicity backup set, and I can import 
the backups in chronological order, so I shouldn't need anything fancy.  I just 
want duplicity to create a backup exactly as it would if the current date were 
really September 27, 2005 (for instance).  I could temporarily alter the system 
clock, but that's not very pretty and might disrupt other things on the 
machine.

I would think it should not be hard to achieve this, but I would welcome any 
suggestions from anyone familiar with the code base on where would be a good 
point to inject this.  In particular, I noticed that `genstrtotime' has an 
optional `override_curtime' arg that perhaps was intended for something like 
this, though as far as I can tell it is not used anywhere. (I am not a python 
expert so I could be missing something.)

Thanks very much!


--

Nate Eldredge
address@hidden