Purge outdated incremental backups

First published: 02 May 2024 (cf)

Summary

With the incremental backup options explained in MMC Area backup possibilities, incremental backup directories for every day are created. These backup directories aren’t cleaned automatically, and it has little advantage to keep old backups.

The Fabasoft tool cleanbackup provides an easy way to delete outdated backups.

Information

Incremental backups are important only in the timespan the data haven’t been backuped by a periodic full backup (e.g. in the night). As soon as another (backup) solution has backuped the data, an old incremental backup gets obsolete and can be purged.

Cleaning up the backup can be performed with fscadmin --cleanupbackup <YYYY-MM-DD>, but a more convenient way is the cleanbackup tool.

Solution

The cleanbackup tool needs to have access to the file system the backups reside.

Usage: cleanbackup <Options>

Mandatory Options

• -root <path> Path to CAS backup directory that should be cleaned up
• -days <days> Minimum number of passed days since the deletion of a file in the CAS area for deleting it in the CAS backup directory too

Optional Options

• -verbose Additionally print deleted files and directories
• -casdeletion <path> Override path to the casdeletion directory

Example

cleanbackup -root /mnt/offlinebackup/MMCSVC1 -days 7 -verbose

The tool checks all incremental backups and deletes all backup directories older than <days> days. It is not required to specify a defined date to delete (as the fscadmin --cleanupbackup requires).