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

[edgar . soldin]

> 
> 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.

2) the switch does _not_ clean or delete anything.

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.

> 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.

> 
> 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.


..ede