HOw to use rsync to delete files older than 1 week

Question

I use rsync to do backups of files and folder\

 rsync -avqz --stats --delete /media/server/ /media/Server2/

Now this deletes files while are not present on source and makes source exact copy of derstination

but my boss wants that i should delete the files only which are not present on source and are 1 week old something like

rsync -avqz --stats --delete(1 week old) /media/server/ /media/Server2/

Any ideas

Answer 1

i would recommend to you and your boss to set up rsnapshot instead. it will give you snapshots as often and going back as far as you like.

Answer 2

Rsync does not support this behavior out of the box. You might find another tool such as rsnapshot such as Jaylen suggested to be a good move.

If you really do want to do exactly as you describe, here is what you can do.

• First, run your rsync WITHOUT a delete. This will just copy everything over from your live data to your backup.
• Next run the rsync again with the delete, but this time in TEST mode (-n). This will generate a list of files to BE deleted based on what has been deleted in your live data but not yet in your backups. Save this output to a file with the date.
• Now keep those list of things to delete, but only process them a week later. Keep a queue and only process the deletion suggestions that have been in the queue for at least a week.

Alternatively, use the output of the rsync --delete -n but instead of queuing, use some other check such as the last modified date in the backup to make sure you only delete things that have not otherwise been edited inside of a week. This is not quite the behavior you asked for but would be easier to program and might suffice.

Answer 3

An alternative tool is rdiff-backup: http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/, which keeps both a mirror and a configurable by date, incremental backup.

A more "hacky" solution that I have used in the past is to use the rsync --delete option every 1 week (or any other desirable time interval) so files in the source which have been deleted a week earlier get deleted at the rsync repo too. It can be automated too in a cron script.