Some information was exchanged on this bug which didn't made it in the bts, so for the record:
Date: Wed, 9 Mar 2005 20:18:55 +0100
From: Christoph Wegscheider <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Hi Charles,
the behaviour you requested might not always be wanted. I'll give you
an example: My hdd died recently and the replacement disk needs some
days to ship. So I grabbed an old, very small hdd and set up my system
again. On this hdd there were no space for my digital images which I
backed up with rsnapshot. I restored the rest and commented out the
backup line for the images. My backups just continued as usual and as
soon as the new hdd was shipped I copied the system, restored my images
and uncommented the image backup line in rsnapshot.conf
With the behaviour you requested I would have been in trouble, cause my
images would have been deleted. I just want to say, that both ways of
handling this have it's advantages. I would prefer the current
behaviour as automatic deletion of backups sounds (and might be) very
dangerous.
However, I forwarded your bug to the upstream author (Nathan), he's the
decision maker. (Nathan, please cc [EMAIL PROTECTED] in
your answer)
btw. If you wanna delete a backup point just delete it under hourly.0,
and rsnapshot will stop to backup it (of course you have to also
remove the line in the configfile).
Christoph
Date: Wed, 09 Mar 2005 11:34:25 -0800
From: Nathan Rosenquist <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Hi everyone,
For the record: I do not wish to change the default behaviour.
My reason, however, is a different one than Christoph mentioned (although I
think that's a good one too).
It is possible to specify directories more than one level deep as backup
points. Therefore, rsnapshot really has no way of knowing whether it would be
OK to delete something or not.
For example, consider this situation:
backup /usr/local/apache/ localhost/ backup /usr/local/samba/ localhost/
How would rsnapshot reliably know to descend down into /usr/local/ and remove a
directory that was no longer being backed up? Worse still, a user could specify
/usr/local/ as another backup point (possibly with exclusions).
What I _do_ hope to implement in the future is an "rm" method of rsnapshot, to
semi-automate deletion of old backup points from the lowest interval's .0
directory.
I.E. "rsnapshot rm localhost/usr/local/samba/" would clear out
"/.snapshots/hourly.0/localhost/usr/local/samba".
Thanks,
-Nathan
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