Re: Cron archive deletion / mass archive deletion

[Arnt Gulbrandsen <arnt@gulbrandsen.priv.no>]

On Wednesday, July 9, 2014 8:30:33 PM CEST, Bob wrote:
> I am using freeBSD and just started tarsnap backups. I would 
> like to understand a reasonable way to do periodic deletes via 
> cron. I have named my backups "lilybackup-yyyy-mm-dd-hh:mm:ss". 
> My hope is to be able to delete backups older than 30 days.

Here's what I use. This keeps ~10 backups around and culls so I have all of 
the most recent ones and a few older backups:

backups=$(/usr/local/bin/tarsnap \
                  --keyfile /root/tarsnap.key \
                  --cachedir /var/lib/tarsnap/cache \
                  --list-archives)

[ 10 -lt $(echo $backups | wc -w) ] && exit 0

for a in $( echo $backups | fmt -1 | sort -r | sed -n '5~3p' ); do
   /usr/local/bin/tarsnap \
       -d \
       --keyfile /root/tarsnap.key \
       --cachedir /var/lib/tarsnap/cache \
       -f $a
done

Arnt