Ubuntu Manpage: expire_backups - Intelligently expire old backups

NAME

       expire_backups - Intelligently expire old backups

SYNOPSIS

          expire_backups [options] <age> [<age> ...]

DESCRIPTION

The expire_backups command intelligently remove old backups that are no longer needed.

To define what backups you want to keep for how long, you define a number of age ranges. expire_backups
ensures that you will have at least one backup in each age range at all times. It will keep exactly as
many backups as are required for that and delete any backups that become redundant.

Age ranges are specified by giving a list of range boundaries in terms of backup cycles. Every time you
create a new backup, the existing backups age by one cycle.

Example: when expire_backups is called with the age range definition 1 3 7 14 31, it will guarantee that
you always have the following backups available:

1. A backup that is 0 to 1 cycles old (i.e, the most recent backup)

2. A backup that is 1 to 3 cycles old

3. A backup that is 3 to 7 cycles old

4. A backup that is 7 to 14 cycles old

5. A backup that is 14 to 31 cycles old

NOTE:
If you do backups in fixed intervals, then one cycle will be equivalent to the backup interval. The
advantage of specifying the age ranges in terms of backup cycles rather than days or weeks is that it
allows you to gracefully handle irregular backup intervals. Imagine that for some reason you do not
turn on your computer for one month. Now all your backups are at least a month old, and if you had
specified the above backup strategy in terms of absolute ages, they would all be deleted! Specifying
age ranges in terms of backup cycles avoids these sort of problems.

expire_backups usage is simple. It requires backups to have names of the forms
year-month-day_hour:minute:seconds (YYYY-MM-DD_HH:mm:ss) and works on all backups in the current
directory. So for the above backup strategy, the correct invocation would be:

expire_backups.py 1 3 7 14 31

When storing your backups on an S3QL file system, you probably want to specify the --use-s3qlrm option as
well. This tells expire_backups to use the s3qlrm command to delete directories.

expire_backups uses a "state file" to keep track which backups are how many cycles old (since this cannot
be inferred from the dates contained in the directory names). The standard name for this state file is
.expire_backups.dat. If this file gets damaged or deleted, expire_backups no longer knows the ages of the
backups and refuses to work. In this case you can use the --reconstruct-state option to try to
reconstruct the state from the backup dates. However, the accuracy of this reconstruction depends
strongly on how rigorous you have been with making backups (it is only completely correct if the time
between subsequent backups has always been exactly the same), so it's generally a good idea not to tamper
with the state file.

OPTIONS

       The expire_backups command accepts the following options:

          --quiet
                 be really quiet

          --debug
                 activate debugging output

          --version
                 just print program version and exit

          --state <file>
                 File to save state information in (default: ".expire_backups.dat")

          -n     Dry run. Just show which backups would be deleted.

          --reconstruct-state
                 Try to reconstruct a missing state file from backup dates.

          --use-s3qlrm
                 Use s3qlrm command to delete backups.

EXIT STATUS

       expire_backups returns exit code 0 if the operation succeeded and 1 if some error occured.

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