[Duplicity-talk] Detecting renames

[Thomas Levine]

Hi

I am considering adding a flag that looks for files that have been
renamed or hard-linked. I want this so that I can back up my emails more
efficiently; I frequently move files to different folders, but I never
change the contents of the files. I am curious as to whether this has
been tried before and whether anyone else would use it.

I imagine that I would maintain a mapping from inode and
hash-of-file-contents to a set of file names that currently point to the
inode. When duplicity is run with this flag, it would first walk the
filesystem and mark what has changed. I presently only really care about
renames, not multiple hard links to the same file, so I think I would
just update the globals.rename dict (as the --rename flag does) for
simple renames; hard links would still be treated as copies.

If there's a good reason why this won't work, maybe I won't do it, and
if other people think they would use it, maybe I will do it.

Tom