Auto Delete Backup Directory Before New One Generated

Dave Peterston

• October 17, 2015 22:22

Hi cPanelers, I hope I am not bothering anyone by asking this. I need to delete a backup directory older than 2 days before a new one is generated. I run a small business transporting PDF files and need to get the backup directory deleted off the server after 2 days. Running with the default cpanel system means I need space to hold an additional backup directory which is only going to be deleted anyway after the new one is saved. That's a huge waste of space. I need the oldest backup directory deleted just before the new one is generated. I have this in the crontab on my server: 30 2 * * * find /backup -type d -ctime +2 -exec rm -rf {} \; This deletes the daily backup directory older than 2 days at 2:30am. It seems to work OK. However, recently the backup process got stuck resulting in the backups not working for about four days I think. The result was the cronjob kept on deleting backup directories older than 2 days so I was left with no backups, and to top is off it ended up deleting the main "/backup" directory too!! Doh!!! I am after something like this: ... At 2:30am delete the daily backup directory older than 2 days old but only if there is a daily backup directory in there older than 1 day old. I have done a heap of research but I have not yet found anything. If anybody knows the right code that would be awesome or is there is a better way. Other threads on this subject seem to tell people to look at the cpanel 'hooks' which is way beyond me but a cronjob code which can be pasted in to the crontab is super easy. Any help would be totally awesome. Thanks heaps

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  cPanelMichael

  • October 28, 2015 13:31

  Hello :) Have you considered using incremental backups? You can choose this setting to store only one uncompressed backup file. The system saves updated account information to the existing backup file, and removes the old information that these updates replace. This setting limits your restoration settings, but runs faster and uses less disk space than other backup types. Thank you.

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  chalupa

  • December 22, 2015 03:27

  Would be better to just remove the .tar.gz files and let cPanel remove the directory itself. Most of the space is taken up by them anyways 30 2 * * * find /backup -type f -ctime +2 -name '*.tar.gz' -exec rm -rf {} \; But the cPanel backups will run after this by default. 1am for legacy and 2am for new backups. So you want that to run earlier than the backups fire? Maybe 30 1 * * * find /backup -type f -ctime +2 -name '*.tar.gz' -exec rm -rf {} \; or if you use legacy backups 30 0 * * * find /backup -type f -ctime +2 -name '*.tar.gz' -exec rm -rf {} \;

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