Any way of automatically *deleting* scheduled backups?

[Brainwrap]

I have several sites on my server and have set up each domain with up to 3 nightly backups. The problem is that once the limit (3) is reached, of course, it stops running backups. This requires me to manually delete the oldest backup in order for a new one to be run, which kind of defeats the whole point of having an automated backup system.

I was wondering whether there's any way (special cron task?) of telling Plesk to automatically delete the oldest backup each time it needs to run a new one? In the above example, for instance, it would automatically delete the backup from 2 days ago, opening up a slot for todays' backup?

 

[crash0verride]

Hi,

"ls -lrt" prints the listing of a directory oldest modified first.

Doing it will get you the following:
-rw-rw-r-- 2 root root 1125 2006-08-21 21:59 Address.pm
-rw-r--r-- 2 root root 624 2006-08-21 22:03 Customer.pm
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1166 2006-08-21 22:23 Account.pm
-rw-r--r-- 2 root root 1385 2006-08-22 10:48 Person.pm
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 20 2006-08-22 10:57 testfile.txt
-rw-r--r-- 2 root root 4888 2006-08-22 11:52 Email.pm

use awk to print the files:

awk '{print $8}'

Use sed to show the oldest file

sed -n 2p

use all these commands in backticks, put it into a script, and tell cron to execute the script every day

example:

#!/bin/sh

rm `ls -lrt /whereyourbackups are/ | awk '{print $8}' | sed -n 2p`

Its a bit messy but will do the trick. Also if you have another partition, I would advocate moving the backup onto a drive with more space, because it is always nice to have an extra copy.



ls -lrt | awk '{print $8}' | sed -n 2p

 

[Brainwrap]

Originally posted by crash0verride
Hi...


...Its a bit messy but will do the trick. Also if you have another partition, I would advocate moving the backup onto a drive with more space, because it is always nice to have an extra copy.

Thanks for the suggestion!

Unfortunately, I'm not much of a programmer/terminal-command guy...I was really wondering whether there was some sort of plug-in GUI interface for this sort of thing.

Still, I'll present your solution to my sysadmin guys and see what they think; additional suggestions are welcome...

Thanks again,

--Charles

 

[breun]

You could also use the find command with the -ctime option (and the -delete option or pipe the results to xargs rm -f). I guess there is no GUI way, but I wouldn't know really as I use another backup tool.