archive: Store include/exclude instructions in metadata

[sophie-h]

I was thinking that being able to look up what this archive should actually include could be a helpful feature.

1. To find out what actually should be included/excluded in this archive.
2. For clients to suggest to inherit the include/exclude from the latest archive while adding a backup to the client.

This would require collecting all the --pattern, --exclude, --exclude-from sources and to be exact also the --keep-exclude-tags, --exclude-if-present, --exclude-caches information and store them for each archive.

[sophie-h]

@ThomasWaldmann This is very high on my wishlist. Does this need any conceptual considerations for 2.0 or is it rather independent?

[ThomasWaldmann]

• we already store the full commandline
• reading stuff from files can result in a lot of data (could have 1 line per file * millions of files).

[sophie-h]

• we already store the full commandline

Yes, I'm already extracting some of the information from there. But if a backup is created with an --exclude-from file argument and the file was in /tmp that's not helpful.

• reading stuff from files can result in a lot of data (could have 1 line per file * millions of files).

I'm not sure if you maybe misunderstood: I don't want to list all included/excluded files. I only want, for example, to combine the list of --excludes and the content of --exclude-file in the metadata. It would be fine to limit it to 1000 lines and indicate that there was more content.

[ThomasWaldmann]

A patterns file, esp. with "full match" patterns can be simply a list of all files to backup, so it can be huge.

Not sure I want to have a feature that can not always work.