Re: cleanup --really-clean ? Re: [Duplicity-talk] Removing incrementals of old full backups

[Olivier Berger]

Hi.

Le vendredi 19 mars 2010 à 21:20 +0100, address@hidden a écrit :
> > 
> > But does this really remove incremental backups on the target backup
> > space, only keeping their base full backups ?
> > 
> > Let me repeat my use case : 
> >         I cannot seem to find a set of duplicity options that would
> >         allow me to keep only full (monthly) backups, if I were to use
> >         "duplicity
> >         incremental --full-if-older-than 30D".
> 
> ok this is a misunderstanding.
> 
> 1) --full-if-older-than 30D is an option used when backing up. It simply
> does fulls on command incremental if a maximum age is arrived. This
> cleans nothing. It simply assures that your incremental chain does not
> grow too long.
> 

OK, perfectly clear.

> 2) the switch does _not_ clean or delete anything.
> 

Uh,... strangely named, then ;)

> 3) there is currently no way to cherry pick delete some backups. If you
> really want to you can have a look in your backup repository and
> manually/scripted delete the backups you do not need anymore. The file
> names are pretty descriptive.
> 

Hence the need for some kind of delete-old-incrementals command IMHO.

> > I imagined this --extra-clean option was just a kind of rm -f on all
> > hidden files instead of rm or regular files, and not a specific removal
> > of only incremental backup files (to take an analogy to unix filesystem)
> 
> command cleanup essentially deletes metafiles in the backup repository
> used solely to make incremental backups without actually 'restoring' the
> latest state and compare it to now. For old backup chains these are not
> needed anymore, therefore they can be deleted.
> But ...
> part of these meta files is information about the files contained in
> these chains, which is currently necessary if you want to use command
> list on backup chains before the recent chain.
> 

OK, so, they are used by some commands, but not needed by the
restoration, so it is safe (although potentially unconveniant) t oremove
them to save space.

> > 
> > Maybe the docs should be improved to make this more explicit ?
> 
> probably .. why don't you suggest a text ;) .. if you dig in the mailing
> list archive about --extra-clean you will find more information because
> we had quite a chat about it when Michael Terry introduced the change.
> 

Sure.

OK... so we've probably a much clearer view of what --extra-clean (and
not --really-clean) does...

But we can try and start again discussing the issue of old incremental
backups removal ;)

Will go back to previous thread.

Thanks for the details.

Best regards,
-- 
Olivier BERGER <address@hidden>
http://www-public.it-sudparis.eu/~berger_o/ - OpenPGP-Id: 2048R/5819D7E8
Ingénieur Recherche - Dept INF
Institut TELECOM, SudParis (http://www.it-sudparis.eu/), Evry (France)