Started using rdiff-backup again and it deleted previous directories/files

[Matthew Glassman]

Hello group,

I figured this was a better place to get help than posting to the GitHub issues 
location.  

Had been using rdiff-backups from around late 2021 to early 2022 while I was 
displaced due to renovations.  I was using it based on an article here 
https://opensource.com/life/16/3/turn-your-old-raspberry-pi-automatic-backup-server
And I got it working as needed though cron never really worked the way it was 
supposed to... I suppose because my local source (running Ubuntu) and my remote 
source (running Raspbian) had different versions of rdiff-backup on it or 
something was funky in the ssh pipeline. 

Anyways, fast foward to this week, I updated my Python on both machines 3.11.2 
on the local and 3.10.x I believe on the remote.  Both machines are running 
rdiff-backup 2.2.3 and both were installed using pip3 as I couldn't get Ubuntu 
to update to same version using apt.

I wanted rdiff-backup to just backup the one file I had added to my 
/home/<user>/Videos  directory on my local to the remote which already had a 
Videos directory in the rdiff location I had previously used.  I was debugging 
a bit with rdiff until I finally got it running without an error or some 
deprecation remark using the following 
rdiff-backup -v8 backup /home/<user>/Videos <Remote>::<path to rdiff backup 
directory>/Videos/  (or something to that) and hit enter

It started firing off all these messages too quick for me to see and too late 
for me to be able to try to comprehend.  Regardless, in the morning, it was 
still trying to process things but wasn't moving forward that I could tell and 
so I checked on my remote and it had deleted and replaced everything.. there 
wasn't even a /Videos directory there anymore.  

So two questions
1. Is it possible to get the original files that were on the remote back on the 
remote prior to this snafu  (will the rdiff-backup-regress work?)2. What would 
have caused this since I didn't tell it to delete anything?  

Regards,
Matthew