I was looking at the howto found here:

http://rdiff-backup.stanford.edu/examples.html

If anyone knows anything about using rdiff, I'd like your input because I'm curious about how this works, exactly. I'm currently using rsync for my backups and I'm wondering how the 2 compare.

Since rdiff does backups that include version history, does that mean if I were to ls -l into the backup directory, I would see additional folders that contain the version history? Can somebody show me what this might look like?

My deal is... I don't think I want to use the restore commands provided in rdiff to do my file restorations. I want the ability to just mv a large block of data to another spot. Can I do that if my backups are made with rdiff? Or will I be copying a bunch of old revisions too?

Thanks in advance.

Your backup directory will be the same as the source directory at the time rdiff-backup was last run with one exception--a directory called "rdiff-backup-data" will be in the backup directory.

You can use cp or cpio to restore files to the state the source directory was in when rdiff-backup was last run; you'll have to omit the rdiff-backup-data directory to avoid copying a bunch of old revisions. You have to use rdiff-backup itself to restore to previous states.

Hope that helped,
Lyle