wishlist addition?

Greg Baumgartel gregb at frii.com
Fri Sep 27 07:28:00 EST 2002


I didn't see this in the wishlist, but using rsync for backups as I'm 
starting to do now, there's a feature that would be really cool.  I 
don't see it in the man page or in any of the docs online.

Basically, I'd like to see an option to modify --delete that deletes 
only destination files that have been missing for over Y days.  For 
backups, this provides a time window on the receiving directory where 
you can retrieve them before they're consigned to oblivion.

So basically it would work

src:/foo/bar/X -> dest:/foo/bar/X

Then src:/foo/bar/X gets deleted.  In normal --delete mode, the next 
time rsync runs, dest:/foo/bar/X gets deleted, too.  What I'd like to do 
is delay that deletion until src:/foo/bar/X has been gone for Y days.

Maybe this has been visited before, as I can't think of a good way, 
other than for rsync to keep an outside DB of what date each file was 
last backed up on (as with the -a option, the timestamps don't indicate 
this, they're set to the source timestamp, which is what I want....).  I 
don't know if any of the 'stat' info on the destination file (like the 
change timestamp - modification definitely wouldn't work....) would be 
useful, though.

Thoughts?

-- 
Greg Baumgartel <gregb at frii.com>




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