I have created a shell script to backup my webfiles + database dump, put it into a tar archive and FTP it offsite. Id like to run it X times per week however I only want to keep the latest 10 backups on the FTP site.
How can I do this best? Should I be doing this work on the shell script side, or is there an FTP command to check last modified and admin things that way?
Any advice would be appreciated.
Thanks,
One way to do something like this would be to use the day of the week in the filename:
Then, when you backup, you would delete or overwrite the backup file for the current day of the week.
(Of course, this way you only get the latest 7 files, but it's a pretty simple method)
Do you have shell access to to the FTP server? If so, I'm sure you could write a script to do this, and schedule a cron job to do the periodic clean up.
Here's something that ought to work:
num_files_to_keep=10
i=0
for file in `ls -tr`; do
if [ $i -ge $num_files_to_keep ]; then
rm $file;
fi;
i=`expr $i + 1`;
done
find . \! -newer `ls -t|head -n 10|tail -n 1`
Unfortunately if executed when there are less than 10 files it deletes the oldest file on every execution (because ! -newer tests for "older or equal" insead of "strictly older" - this can be remedied by checking first:
[ `ls|wc -l` -gt 10 ] && find . \! -newer `ls -t|head -n 10|tail -n 1`
If you're going down the shell path, try this:
find /your-path/ -mtime +7 -type f -exec rm -rf {} \;
This would delete everything older than a certain date (in this case 7 days). May be more relevant depending on whether you need to keep multiple backups for one day. E.g. yesterday I did ten revisions of the same website.
