v23.11.0

• Fixed: Restore now sets Unix user/group ownership on symlinks and directories. Previously, only file ownership was restored. (Setting file ownership typically requires restoring as root.)

• Performance: Also keep a cache of the existence of blocks that have not yet been read.

• Changed: The format and keys written by --metrics-json has changed.

• Changed: New more detailed progress display, especially during backup.

v23.9.0

• S3 support! Enable it with cargo install --features s3, then e.g. cargo backup s3://mybucket.example/.

• Performance: A simple cache of retrieved decompressed blocks now speeds up restores, especially on relatively slow storage like S3.

• --debug now shows on stderr only debug messages from Conserve itself and not from dependencies. All the messages are still recorded to the --log-json file if that is given.

• Robustness: during backup, if the blocks referenced by the previous version are missing or zero length, write new blocks rather than referencing them. This allows the archive to better recover from filesystem corruption so that at least new backups are fully readable.

• Deprecate low-value --metrics-json.

Conserve 23.5.0

• Better progress bars for various operations including validate.

• Don't complain if unable to chown during restore; this is normal when not run as root.

• New --log-json global option to capture all logs, and --metrics-json to write out counters.

• New internal non-breaking format change: backups (in the band header) can now declare some format flags needed to read the backup correctly. If any format flags are set then at least Conserve 23.2.0 is needed to read the backup.

• New --changes-json option to restore and backup.

• diff output format has changed slightly to be the same as backup.

• New diff --json and ls --json.

v23.1.1

• Fixed: User and group mappings are now cached in memory. This fixes a performance regression in restore on the order of 10%.

• Changed: Timestamps in conserve versions are now in RFC 3339 format, including a T between the date and the time, and a timezone indicator.

v23.1.0

• Switched to CalVer versioning.

• New: Support for storing, restoring, and listing Unix owner, group, and permissions.
  Thanks to @believeinlain.

• Fixed: --exclude /a now also excludes everything under /a from listing, diff, restore, etc.
  (Previously you would have to write /a/**.)

• Fixed: validate should not complain about GC_LOCK or .DS_Store files in the archive directory.

Conserve 0.6.16

Released 2022-08-12

• Fixed: Previously, if the first backup in an archive was incomplete, Conserve could get painfully slow, due to a bug that caused it to repeatedly reread the incomplete index. (Thanks to WolverinDEV.)

• Archives may be specified as URLs: currently only as file:/// URLs.

• Changed the format of text output from conserve backup -v: it only shows new or changed files (and currently only plain files), and the file state is shown by a single-character prefix similar to conserve diff, rather than a suffix.

• Changed to use Nutmeg to draw progress bars, which changes their appearance somewhat.

• Added a --no-progress option.

• Added a --debug option.

Conserve 0.6.15

v0.6.15 2021-01-23

• Find referenced blocks by walking all bands in parallel. This significantly speeds up GC, deletion, etc: 6.5x faster in one test.

• Exclude patterns changed: patterns starting with a / match against the entire path from the top of the tree, and patterns not starting with a slash match anywhere inside the path. For example, /target/release will only exclude release inside a directory called target in the tree root, but target/release will exclude anything called release inside a directory called target anywhere in the tree.

• Add new --exclude-from option.

• Add new --no-stats option.

• Directories marked with CACHEDIR.TAG are automatically excluded from backups.

Conserve 0.6.10

• File, directory and symlink modification times are restored by conserve restore.

• conserve backup -v shows whether files are new, modified, etc.

v0.6.9

Small files are combined into blocks, which makes backups faster and the archive smaller.

Backups use a stitched index as the basis. As a result, Conserve is better able to recognize unchanged files after an interrupted backup.

Other smaller improvements.

0.6.8

Added conserve delete command.