[rdiff-backup-users] alternate use of max-file-size grows increments

[Moses]

Hello,

We use rdiff-backup for a remote offsite backup. The backup itself is on 
a portable drive but now hangs off its own server at the remote site. We 
have it setup to update remotely every night, but since our bandwidth is 
limited, we use a max-file-size of 10megs, so as not to take all day.
Every few weeks the offsite hard drive comes back onsite and runs the 
same rdiff-backup without the max-file-size option to catch all the 
bigger files.

This seems to be working good, except.. when you run rdiff-backup with 
the max-file-size limit the backup sees the large files as missing, and 
gets deleted (or put into the increments) on the backup side. Then when 
the drive comes back onsite and you run without the max-file-size option 
the file gets 'found' again and gets added to the backup again. What 
ends up happening is we have alternating increments of the same LARGE 
files, and the backup gets big pretty quickly.

I'm sure not too many people run into this, and its not a bug. I believe 
max-file-size just excludes the files like they were not there.. maybe 
if they were marked as existing and just ignored somehow that would 
work, instead of rdiff believing they were actually deleted? Is so, 
another command switch to turn on that type of logic might work.

I looked at the docs and couldn't come up with any way to avoid this, by 
any chance did I miss an option that might 'fix' this issue?

I appreciate any help!

Regards,
-Moses