Can I do a “test run” with rsnapshot?

Question

I occasionally make changes to my rsnapshot.conf and I'm wondering if there's any way I can do a test run that is sync-ed to a location other than the normal flow... something that's not an interval. Is this possible? how?

Answer 1

I don't have an rsnapshot setup to test this on. Be careful.

Personally, I think that the best thing to do is to carefully evaluate the output of rsnapshot -t interval. However if you want to actually move files, one way to do it might be to create an alternate config file that is identical to your real config file but with a different snapshot_root such as:

snapshot_root   /test/backup/path

And then you can run your test using

rsnapshot -c rsnapshot.test.conf interval0

where interval0 is your lowest order interval.