>
> I saw the "dirvish-expire --time time_expression" command, but that
> doesn't
> accelerate the expiry of existing backups, either.
>
Some of my back-up strategies involve keeping some back-ups for 6-months or
a year. Since I don't really know if my retention periods match my back-up
capacity for at least one complete cycle of the longest retention period, I
can have a lot of back-ups piled up by the time I find out I need to make
some changes to the retention period policies.
As an alternative to the current approach of determining the retention
period for a back-up at the time of the back-up, how about having
dirvish-expire recalculate the expiration dates each time it runs based on
its current rules? That way, if I find I've set my retention periods too
high (say 365 days), and decide I want to back down to something shorter
(say 280 days), I can just adjust the rule set and the next run of
dirvish-expire will dispose of everything that is now too old.
Deleting old back-ups during such a policy change is pretty easy if my
retention plan is simple (i.e. everything is kept for x days). It's with
complex policies that this change really pays off. If my old policy was,
for example:
1st of month: keep for 13 months
Sundays: keep for 6 months
Mondays: keep for 35 days
Default: keep for 7 days
And I want to set the "Sundays" down to 3 months, now I have to go and
manually pick out all the Sundays that are over 3 months old and delete
them, unless they're also on the 1st of the month, and make sure not to get
any of the other older and younger back-ups by mistake. If I could simply
adjust the expiration policy in the appropriate .conf file and leaving
dirvish-expire to do the picking and choosing, that would be much more
reliable.
A variation would be leave dirvish-expire as-is by default, but to add an
option to recalculate expiration dates according to the current rules. That
would be fine with me, too. Thoughts?
-Brian Martin
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