I'm trying to design a daily backup system based on rsync that will keep deleted files for N days after they went missing, and am wondering if there's a way I can coax rsync to give me a list of files that are missing on the source relative to the destination, so that they can be later deleted (ie after the N days). I envision a system like this:
rsync [args] --list-of-missing=FilesToDelete [src] [dest] and then process ToDelete like so (supposing N is 3): 1. mv ToDelete-2 ToDelete-3 && mv ToDelete-1 ToDelete-2 2. cat ToDelete | grep -vf ToDelete-2 -f ToDelete-3 > ToDelete-1 3. delete from dest files mentioned in ToDelete-3 4. rm ToDelete-3 So I realize I can use --dry-run and --delete, and capture and parse the output of rsync, but then I've spent a whole lot of time building file lists and pretending to transfer files (or maybe even doing all the checksumming and whatnot -- does --dry-run still do all that?), and then I need to do it again to actually do the backup. The backup runs about 60 gigs, and takes around an hour to do once (for the incremental backups -- the inital takes quite a bit longer), so I'd rather not have the system do it twice, if avoidable. Is there any way to make this work? Or am I barking up the wrong tree with rsync for this kind of backup scheme? Or is there another way to accomplish the same goal (keeping deleted files from src in dest for N days)? Thanks, dsc -- To unsubscribe or change options: https://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/rsync Before posting, read: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
