How to delete a whole destination tree (inclusive the destination its-self) with rsync (daemon)?

[Edvinas Valatka]

On Sun, 31 Oct 2010 03:15:37 +0100
Vahsen Beheer <beheer at vahsen.nl> wrote:

> Hi!
> 
> I am backing up  (using --link-dest, hard links) to a NAS which has
> an 'rsync' daemon running. I do not have ssh access to this
> Storage-device. Part of my script needs to delete whole remote
> directory trees. This seems difficult with rsync.
> 
> 
> A nice trick is to make an empty source directory:
> 
> rsync -a --delete /tmp/empty-dir/
> remote-host::Backups/daily.20101030-0155
> 
> 
> This works perfect. It deletes the contents of destination. However,
> need it to also delete the destination directory its-self.
> 
> This seems something very easy, but after searching for many hours in
> the manual, FAQ, Web and forum did not reveal a solution.
> 
> 
> Is it possible to have rsync also delete the 'destination-directory' ?
> (Or do i need to work from its parent-directory of the destination -
> here the module itsself ? Or do something with filters?)
> 
> The next also does not work (it deletes all! from the Backups module):
> 
> rsync -a --exclude='/***' --include='/daily.20101030-0155/'
> --delete /tmp/empty-dir/ remote-host::Backups
> 
> 
> Any tips? Did anyone ever tried this? :)
> Thanks a lot in advance!
> Robert
> 
> 
> PS: I also looked into the --prune-empty-dirs option, without success
> though.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
Maybe better: rsync -ndivv -f '-!pr /daily.20101030-0155'
--del  /tmp/empty_dir/ remote-host::Backups/