rsync - Sep 2002 - wishlist addition?

I didn't see this in the wishlist, but using rsync for backups as I'm 
starting to do now, there's a feature that would be really cool.  I 
don't see it in the man page or in any of the docs online.

Basically, I'd like to see an option to modify --delete that deletes 
only destination files that have been missing for over Y days.  For 
backups, this provides a time window on the receiving directory where 
you can retrieve them before they're consigned to oblivion.

So basically it would work

src:/foo/bar/X -> dest:/foo/bar/X

Then src:/foo/bar/X gets deleted.  In normal --delete mode, the next 
time rsync runs, dest:/foo/bar/X gets deleted, too.  What I'd like to do 
is delay that deletion until src:/foo/bar/X has been gone for Y days.

Maybe this has been visited before, as I can't think of a good way, 
other than for rsync to keep an outside DB of what date each file was 
last backed up on (as with the -a option, the timestamps don't indicate 
this, they're set to the source timestamp, which is what I want....).  I 
don't know if any of the 'stat' info on the destination file (like
the
change timestamp - modification definitely wouldn't work....) would be 
useful, though.

Thoughts?

-- 
Greg Baumgartel <gregb@frii.com>

On Fri, 27 Sep 2002, Greg Baumgartel wrote:
>
> I didn't see this in the wishlist, but using rsync for backups as
I'm
> starting to do now, there's a feature that would be really cool.  I
> don't see it in the man page or in any of the docs online.
>
> Basically, I'd like to see an option to modify --delete that deletes
> only destination files that have been missing for over Y days.  For
> backups, this provides a time window on the receiving directory where
> you can retrieve them before they're consigned to oblivion.
>
> So basically it would work
>
> src:/foo/bar/X -> dest:/foo/bar/X
>
> Then src:/foo/bar/X gets deleted.  In normal --delete mode, the next
> time rsync runs, dest:/foo/bar/X gets deleted, too.  What I'd like to
do
> is delay that deletion until src:/foo/bar/X has been gone for Y days.
>
> Maybe this has been visited before, as I can't think of a good way,
> other than for rsync to keep an outside DB of what date each file was
> last backed up on (as with the -a option, the timestamps don't indicate
> this, they're set to the source timestamp, which is what I want....). 
I
> don't know if any of the 'stat' info on the destination file
(like the
> change timestamp - modification definitely wouldn't work....) would be
> useful, though.
>
> Thoughts?

Take a look at this document:
	http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/

It will accomplish very much what you're talking about.  It's not
integrated into rsync, but it's also only a few short lines of script.

Won't help on Windows though.

-- 
Brian Mathis
Direct Edge
http://www.directedge.com