Importance of Backups in Hosting Industry

In the hosting industry, sudden failure of a hard disk can cause sleepless nights for server owners and can cause a bad reputation company as well. Also having proper remote backups is an added advantage to the customers as well and can attract some customers as well due to this. Rdiff-backup is one such tool which is having great features that every hosting owner will wish to have. 

What is Rdiff-backup

Rdiff-backup is a powerful remote backup tool that is based on python.

Rdiff-backup backs up one directory to another possibly over the network. The target directory will have a copy of the source directory but extra reverse diffs of that directory are stored in a subdirectory which will help us to recover files from long ago. In this tool, they have combined the features of mirroring and incremental backups. 

Rdiff-backup preserves subdirectories, hard links, uid/gid ownership (provided this is running as root), resource forks, modification times, permissions, etc which makes this a perfect tool for backups 

In this blog, we mainly discuss only the removal of old backups. 

How to remove old backups from rdiff-backup properly 

To remove old backups from rdiff-backup ( so-called increments ), you can use “–remove-older-than” option of rdiff-backup command. You should have to specify the “time from which” value as well along with that switch. The rdiff-backup tool provides the flexibility to define that time_spec value in years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds. Each representation is given below.

To Remove backups older than one year, use the below 

–remove-older-than 1Y 

To Remove backups older than one month, use the below 

–remove-older-than 1M 

To Remove backups older than one week, use the below 

–remove-older-than 1W

To Remove backups older than one hour, use the below 

–remove-older-than 1h 

To Remove backups older than one minute, use the below 

–remove-older-than 1m 

To Remove backups older than one second, use the below 

–remove-older-than 1s 

The entire command to remove backups ( increments ) should look like following

rdiff-backup –force –remove-older-than 15W /backup/

Here /backup/ where you keep your rdiff-backup. Make sure to provide the exact backup directory; you cannot pass increments directory path directly to this command. It will select the respective increments to remove, based on the time spam given.