rsync - Nov 2003 - Backup with rsync until one month

Hello,  
  
I use rsync in the company to make a backup every 4 hours.  
  
but I would like to do in a way like this, that the rsync make a backup of the
changed files until one month long.

EX:- file.bak.001 file.bak.002 .....

This file will be to get always, and so i can get the all files untill an one
month old version of the file.

  
Is it possible? 

Regardes


Dipl.-Ing.  Nazar Hassan
Tel  +49 (02 41) 9 91 21-13
Fax +49 (02 41) 9 91 21-59
nhassan@databay.de
 
Databay AG
H?ttenstra?e 7
D-52068 Aachen
www.databay.de

> Hello,
>
> I use rsync in the company to make a backup every 4 hours.
>
> but I would like to do in a way like this, that the rsync make a backup of
> the changed files until one month long.
>
> EX:- file.bak.001 file.bak.002 .....
>
> This file will be to get always, and so i can get the all files untill an
> one month old version of the file.
>
>
> Is it possible?
I don't think you need rsync at all for this. Just use fine to identify
which files are older than 1 month and use rename to change the file
extentions.

Mike

-- 
A program should be written to  model the concepts of the task it
performs rather than the physical world or a process because this
maximizes the  potential for it  to be applied  to tasks that are
conceptually similar and, more  important, to tasks that have not
yet been conceived.

Nazar Hassan wrote on 25.11.2003 15:14:
> Hello,  
>   
> I use rsync in the company to make a backup every 4 hours.  
>   
> but I would like to do in a way like this, that the rsync make a backup of
the changed files until one month long.
> 
> EX:- file.bak.001 file.bak.002 .....
> 
> This file will be to get always, and so i can get the all files untill an
one month old version of the file.
> 
>   
> Is it possible? 
> 
> Regardes
Have a look at http://www.pollux.franken.de/hjb/rsback/
That will do the trick.

hjb :-?
-- 
Hans-Juergen Beie
Phone: +49 911 396628 / +49 173 3546274
Fax: +49 911 396663
mailto:hjb@pollux.franken.de

On Tue, Nov 25, 2003 at 03:14:54PM +0100, Nazar Hassan wrote:
[reformatted -- please use shorter lines]
> Hello,  
>   
> I use rsync in the company to make a backup every 4 hours.  
>   
> but I would like to do in a way like this, that the rsync
> make a backup of the changed files until one month long. 
> 
> EX:- file.bak.001 file.bak.002 .....
> 
> This file will be to get always, and so i can get the all
> files untill an one month old version of the file. 
Current command lines and examples of before and after, both
current and desired would help immensely in understanding
what it is you are doing and what you want.

It sounds to me like you are using rsync every four hours to
make backups and you want to use the --backup option to
preserve the old versions of the files (what i call
decremental backups).

At this time the backup files are being replaced the next
time the rsync runs and they never get removed.

If i understood you correctly the easiest thing to do exactly
that would be to specify a --suffix value to rsync that
included the date and hour of the backup.  --suffix=`date
+.BAK.%y%m%d%H` might suffice.  Then you could run a nightly
script that would find all the .BAK. files and compare their
date strings against LAST_MONTH=`date -d "-1 month"
+%y%m%d%H` for and rm them.  This assumes you aren't using
the --backup-dir option which in a way makes this even
easier.

Unless there is a particular reason for having decrementals
you might be better off using --link-dest instead of
--backup.  Mike Rubel has a writeup (out-of-date? translation
available on German wiki) that uses --link-dest for a 1 week
rotation but could be made into a 1 month rotation easily
enough.  You could look into dirvish, there are others using
it to do backups every four hours and it does automatic
cleanups.

-- 
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