On Thu, Sep 03, 2009 at 07:08:28PM -0700, James Downs wrote:
On Sep 3, 2009, at 3:14 PM, Chris G wrote:
Is there any easy/obvious way of archiving old data out of home
directories so that rdiff-backup backups shrink? I suspect that there
If you delete data from the source directories, and then later "--
remove-older-than", old versions will get purged, including files that
were deleted. At that point, you will no longer be able to recover that
file.
Is this what you're looking for?
Yes, sort of, but not quite as --remove-older-than will remove
*everything* older than the given date won't it?
Some very old stuff I want to keep but not others.
E.g. I have a ~/tmp directory which gets backup up, it would be nice
to be able to clear out ~/tmp *and* the backups of it. I do want it
to be backed up but there's a fair chance that I don't want to keep
the backups for long. There are other similar but less well defined
areas.
Another very obvious example is if one renames or moves a large chunk
of data. I currently have my photographs catalogued and managed by
digikam, I'm thinking of renaming the root of my pictures now that
digikam can have multiple roots, if I do this I'll have 200Gb or so of
duplicated backup!
I want the ability to, for example, rename ~/pictures (the current
digikam tree) to, say, ~/images. Then, once things have settled, I
want to be able to delete the backup of ~/pictures as eveything that
was there is now in ~/images. OK, I'll lose any history but once I've
checked the new digikam tree is OK there's no history that I want or
need.
I believe what you're wanting is to be able to use --include and
--exclude parameters with --remove-older-than. There's a patch
available for this, but it hasn't been merged into the main tree.