Hi I'm trying to build a backup system based on rsync. It should work with different destinations (local, share, remote etc) that's why I'm looking for ways how every operation can be controlled from the client side.
I want to create full backups and incremental backups. For the incremental backups I use --compare-dest lastfullbackup. This works nicely except that the whole directory tree is created even if no files are copied. This is mentioned several times on the Internet and the usual answer is that there's no way around it because of the way that rsync works. I don't mind that they are created if there's a (rsync-)way to delete them again afterwards, something like rsync -a --delete --prune-empty-dirs dest dest Unfortunately at least one place has to be local, doing a remote-remote is not possible. The second problem is that I want to delete older backups. I can use rsync -a --delete empty_local_folder remote_folder_to_delete to get rid of the contents. However the folder itself still remains. So after a while I'd have a lot of empty folders. As I want this to work on various systems I can't (and don't want to) use remote shell hacks like "do_something && rsync ". Also the policy of what and when to delete should be configurable from the client. Are there pure rsync ways to solve these two problems? Thanks bye Fabi -- Please use reply-all for most replies to avoid omitting the mailing list. To unsubscribe or change options: https://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/rsync Before posting, read: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html