Backup Central

forgive me if this has been covered before, but it wasn't clear from the
documentation whether i could do this, and web searches were basically
useless.

i have certain files scattered throughout my filesystem, that because of
their binary nature, have most or all of their contents backed up daily.
here's the problem: even for a file as small as 50M you could end up
with 1G of backups every 20 days. my regular --remove-older-than is
currently set to eight months, mostly because i'm paranoid and disk
space is pretty cheap. but, relative to their actual size, these files
occupy a disproportionate amount of "backup space", measured as actual
file size plus increment sizes. also, these particular files are usually
only needed in their current state in case of catastrophic failure. if
they could all be centralized, i could run a separate backup, but that
is not an option.

my proposed solution:
i would like to be able to use file selection criteria with
--remove-older-than so that i could shorten the time period for these
files, in essence only keeping a two or three day backup.

other options:
i am open to other suggestions that might accomplish the same thing.

On 18 Nov 2004, Sherrard Burton <sburton < at > allafrica.com> wrote:
my proposed solution:
i would like to be able to use file selection criteria with
--remove-older-than so that i could shorten the time period for these
files, in essence only keeping a two or three day backup.

As far as I know rdiff-backup doesn't have this feature at the moment.

other options:
i am open to other suggestions that might accomplish the same thing.

Make two backups, using include and exclude options to put the
binaries in one and everything else in the other. A bit kludgy and
slightly inefficient by terms of storing directories twice, but it
should work. Roll one after 20 days and the other after 240.

--
Martin

Martin Pool wrote:
On 18 Nov 2004, Sherrard Burton <sburton < at > allafrica.com> wrote:

my proposed solution:
i would like to be able to use file selection criteria with
--remove-older-than so that i could shorten the time period for these
files, in essence only keeping a two or three day backup.


As far as I know rdiff-backup doesn't have this feature at the moment.


other options:
i am open to other suggestions that might accomplish the same thing.


Make two backups, using include and exclude options to put the
binaries in one and everything else in the other. A bit kludgy and
slightly inefficient by terms of storing directories twice, but it
should work. Roll one after 20 days and the other after 240.

thanks. i was thinking i would have to have a separate backup for each
binary file, but you have helped me realize that i only need one
additional backup if i use the correct --exclude and --include options.

Sherrard Burton wrote:
other options:
i am open to other suggestions that might accomplish the same thing.

I don't think you can do what you want with --remove-older-than.
however you could probably exclude the files based on their extension or
regexp? there is the --exclude-regexp and --exclude-globbing-filelist to
help you there. You could also run some combo of find and grep and maybe
file to produce the list of excludes before each backup. then just
reverse the process for the alternate backup of the binaries

dave