Re: [rdiff-backup-users] RFE - keep a certain number of increments

[Luke Mewburn]

On Thu, Aug 28, 2003 at 11:19:35AM -0700, Alan wrote:
  | Hey folks.  Is there a way to tell rdiff-backup to keep a certain number
  | of files?  I currently use remove-older-than which works great, but I'd
  | like it to keep N incremental backups regardless of how old they are.
  | My reasoning for this is that I was having some problems with my remote
  | backup host and finally got around to getting them fixed today.  As the
  | last backup was a while ago (~15D) and I use remove-older-than 10D (to
  | keep disk usage down), when I finally got a good backup today I only
  | have one, which is fine, but it makes me a bit nevous still.  
  | 
  | What would be cool is an option similar to --remove-older-than that
  | would be something like --keep-number-backups 4 which would keep the
  | last 4 backups, regardless of how old they were.  
  | 
  | Comments? 

I'd actually like the ability to remove specific increments rather
than a blanket "remove older than", so I can experiment with
different increment schedules.

For example, in the USENIX ;login magazine from June 2003 (volume
28 number 3), Diomidis Spinellis has an article titled "organised
pruning of file sets" which documents his research into the benefits
of different retention schedules.  C.f
http://www.spinellis.gr/sw/unix/prune/