"Stateless Linux" project

Jeff Spaleta jspaleta at gmail.com
Wed Sep 15 20:27:39 UTC 2004


On Wed, 15 Sep 2004 14:14:08 -0500, Eli Carter <eli.carter at inet.com> wrote:
> Use rdiff-backup (mentioned in other comments).
> Set up some simple policy on how long to keep which backups.
> Provide a simple 'restore lost file from backup' GUI (and commandline)
> utilities.
> 
> The "simple" policy I would advocate would be to keep incremental
> backups on this schedule:
> One per day for the last week.
> One per week for the last month[1]
> One per month for the last N months, where N <= 14 [2], and have N
> automatically fluctuate as disk space on the server is consumed and
> freed.  (May warn the user when it is about to be decreased.)
> [1] Define "month" to mean "4 weeks" for simplicity.
> [2] For a year, N = 52/4 = 13, and add one so you can get last April's
> tax return you inadvertantly deleted.

rdiff-backup doesn't allow for that finegrained of a policy currently.
removing of old incrementals is only exposed with a "remove later than
this point" option.
You'd have to hook into current rdiff-backup development discussions
about the likelyhood
of that feature being expanded to allow for culling of increments in
dateranges while leaving some. For example i run rdiff-backup nightly,
and then tell it to remove increments older than 1 month old. There is
no way for me to tell it things like "remove everything older than 1
month except for 1 increment as close to the start of each month as
possible"
-jef"rdiff-backup --make-me-a-sandwich"spaleta





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