Re: [rdiff-backup-users] About DeleteIntermediate feature

[Andreas Olsson]

On Thursday 10 January 2008 23:22:47 Yannick Patois wrote:
> On the wiki, I saw this request for a "DeleteIntermediate" feature:
> http://wiki.rdiff-backup.org/wiki/index.php/DeleteIntermediate
Yes, that feature would most definitely be useful.

> Could this be emulated by some script? Doing a sequence of:
> for date in (some dates):
>       rdiff-backup -r date /repository/A /tmparea
>       rdiff-backup --current-time date /tmparea /repository/B
Yes, that sounds like a working approach. I guess the challenge is to match 
the inputed dates to the available backups. What might be nice is that if the 
script could take arguments in the form of daily, monthly, etc.

Besides, the concept of building a new repository might actually be a Good 
Thing.  That way you don't have to worry about what will happen to your 
backups if something goes wrong during the DeleteIntermediate. If the newly 
built repository doesn't check out properly you just thought it away, 
otherwise you can replace your old copy with it.
 
> Problem I see are:
> - It will take a lot of space (3 times backup space at least)
Yes, which  is kind of ironic since you wouldn't have to worry about deleting 
intermediate parts if you had plenty of free space. I guess the usefull thing 
would be to run a script like this regular, and by doing that preventing your 
backups from growing to large to handle.

> - It will take a lot of time  (maybe even more than the time between two
>    scheduled backups - 24h for us)
Only one way to find out :-) Test cases...

> - Will "--current-time date" option work fine for this?
I can't see why not.

Seems by the way as if that options might be more useful than originally 
thought. The man-page has the following thing to say about it:
"This option is useful mainly for testing...."

-- 
Andreas Olsson
http://www.andreasolsson.se/

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