[Bobs-devel] incremental backup cleanup

[Joe Z. <jz...@co...>]

Rene,

I was going to add a routine to cleanup incremental backups but now I'm 
not sure. I was planning to remove incremental files that were backed up 
over X days ago, but now I see the field text is "How many incremental 
backups to keep (0 = infinite)", which seems to mean how many copies of 
an incremental file to keep. So if incremental is set to 9, then there 
could be up to 9 copies of any incremental file. This means the 
incremental backup directory could be up to 9 times as large as the 
current backup.

Here's some points to ponder:

If we keep X copies of incrementals:
o    The amount of storage required "could" be much more than if we kept 
X days.
o    It's going to be programmatically difficult and time consuming to 
read through all the file names in incremental and count how many there 
are of each.

If we keep X days worth of incrementals:
o   The only backup copy of a file would be deleted after X days if the 
file hasn't been changed. That's probably not a good thing.
o    Removing the incremental files is easily done with a command like this:
      find /path/to/bobsdata/incremental/<server>/<share>/ -type f 
-ctime +<days> -ctime -999 -exec rm -v {} ';'

So I'm wondering 1) what your intention is for this field, 2) what are 
you doing on your bobs system to cleanup incremental files, and 3) how 
do you suggest I proceed?

The question is what do we want our selection criteria to be: "how many" 
or "how long?"

Cheers,
Joe