Quick question about the command find.

[Preston Hagar]

On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 9:18 AM, Maxime Alarie <malarie at processia.com> wrote:
> I know its dangerous, but im okay with it..   here is why
>
>
>
> /dev/sda1:/var/backups  synchs  to  /dev/sdb1:/backup  every night.  AND
>  once a week : /dev/sdb1:/backup synchs to  this external  usb disk
> /dev/sdc:/backup (offsite)
>
>
>
> Sda1 and sdb1 are 250GB disks…  sdc is 1TB.  I want to erase 15 days+ old
> backups from  sda1 and sdb1 J
>
>
>
> I will try your commands. Thanks much for the help guys.
>

I know this doesn't directly answer your question, but there might be
an easier/safer way to rotate your backups.  It really depends on how
you do your backups, but from the sound of things, you might be using
rsync and a cron job.  Anyway, here is a nice little backup script I
use that uses cron and rsync.  I have tried to comment throughout it
so it will be clear what each part does:


#!/bin/bash

# log output to file
exec > /var/log/backup.log

echo "*****Backup Started: " `date`

# set this variable to the directory you want to place your backups in
backup_dir=/var/backups/

echo "Rotating Snapshots"
cd $backup_dir/

#remove the oldest backup and advance all other days backups by one
rm -rf 15
mv 14 15
mv 13 14
mv 12 13
mv 11 12
mv 10 11
mv 9 10
mv 8 9
mv 7 8
mv 6 7
mv 5 6
mv 4 5
mv 3 4
mv 2 3
mv 1 2

# Copy the current to the snapshot head
# the cp -al creates hard links during the copy, so if a file remains
unchanged, it is only stored
# on disk once.  This allows for many more days of backups since you
are only storing each changed
# copy of a file and not multiple copies of identical files
cp -al $backup_dir/current $backup_dir/1

# the touch commands will update the timestamp on the backup
directories so you can easily find out what date/time
# a given backup was made
touch $backup_dir/current
touch -r $backup_dir/current $backup_dir/1

echo "Archiving to backup folder"
# backup the /home directory.  You can change that to whatever
directory you need to backup
# or you can have multiple rsync lines for each directory you need to back up.
# On some machines, I have done the opposite, I backup / and use an
--exclude-from file to exclude the directories I do _not_ want
rsync -av /home/ $backup_dir/current/

echo "********Backup Completed: " `date`


# END SCRIPT

As an example, on one server I use this script on I can store 40 days
of backups of 230 GB of data, using only 372 GB of space for the
backups.  This is because of the cp line that uses hard links.  How
many days you can store really depends on how much your data that you
are backing up changes each day.

Hopefully this might help.  With this script, you can easily
increase/decrease the number of days by modifying the mv and rm lines.
 You could also put the mv lines in a for block if you wanted to clean
it up a bit, I just have never got around to it.

Preston