Delete remote folder

[Fabian Cenedese]

Hi

I'm trying to build a backup system based on rsync. It should
work with different destinations (local, share, remote etc) that's
why I'm looking for ways how every operation can be controlled
from the client side.

I want to create full backups and incremental backups. For the
incremental backups I use --compare-dest lastfullbackup. This
works nicely except that the whole directory tree is created
even if no files are copied. This is mentioned several times
on the Internet and the usual answer is that there's no way
around it because of the way that rsync works. I don't mind
that they are created if there's a (rsync-)way to delete them
again afterwards, something like

rsync -a --delete --prune-empty-dirs dest dest

Unfortunately at least one place has to be local, doing a
remote-remote is not possible.

The second problem is that I want to delete older backups.
I can use

rsync -a --delete empty_local_folder remote_folder_to_delete

to get rid of the contents. However the folder itself still remains.
So after a while I'd have a lot of empty folders.

As I want this to work on various systems I can't (and don't
want to) use remote shell hacks like "do_something && rsync ".
Also the policy of what and when to delete should be configurable
from the client.

Are there pure rsync ways to solve these two problems?

Thanks

bye  Fabi