rotate-backups 0.1

Simple command line interface for backup rotation

Backups are good for you. Most people learn this the hard way (including me). Nowadays my Linux laptop automatically creates a full system snapshot every four hours by pushing changed files to an rsync daemon running on the server in my home network and creating a snapshot afterwards using the cp -al command (the article Easy Automated Snapshot-Style Backups with Linux and Rsync explains the basic technique). The server has a second disk attached which asynchronously copies from the main disk so that a single disk failure doesn’t wipe all of my backups (the “time delayed replication” aspect has also proven to be very useful).

Okay, cool, now I have backups of everything, up to date and going back in time! But I’m running through disk space like crazy… A proper deduplicating filesystem would be awesome but I’m running crappy consumer grade hardware and e.g. ZFS has not been a good experience in the past. So I’m going to have to delete backups…

Deleting backups is never nice, but an easy and proper rotation scheme can help a lot. I wanted to keep things manageable so I wrote a Python script to do it for me. Over the years I actually wrote several variants. Because I kept copy/pasting these scripts around I decided to bring the main features together in a properly documented Python package and upload it to the Python Package Index.

• Features

• Status

• Getting started

• Contact

• License

• Real example

Features

Dry run mode

Use it. I’m serious. If you don’t and rotate-backups eats more backups than intended you have no right to complain ;-)

Flexible rotation

Rotation with any combination of hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and yearly retention periods.

Fuzzy timestamp matching in filenames

The modification times of the files and/or directories are not relevant. If you speak Python regular expressions, here is how the fuzzy matching works:

# Required components.
(?P<year>\d{4}) \D?
(?P<month>\d{2}) \D?
(?P<day>\d{2}) \D?
(
   # Optional components.
   (?P<hour>\d{2}) \D?
   (?P<minute>\d{2}) \D?
   (?P<second>\d{2})?
)?

All actions are logged

Log messages are saved to the system log (e.g. /var/log/syslog) so you can retrace what happened when something seems to have gone wrong.

Status

Note the version number 0.1. That’s not to say that rotate-backups doesn’t already do exactly what I want it to, I just don’t fully trust it yet so won’t give it a 1.0 version.

Also, I haven’t written automated tests to very correctness yet, so until then please feel free to use the dry run mode to verify that what will happen is what you expect.

Getting started

To install:

$ pip install rotate-backups

To run:

$ rotate-backups --help
Usage: rotate-backups [OPTIONS] DIRECTORY..

Supported options:

 -H, --hourly=NUM    how many hourly backups to preserve
 -d, --daily=NUM     how many daily backups to preserve
 -w, --weekly=NUM    how many weekly backups to preserve
 -m, --monthly=NUM   how many monthly backups to preserve
 -y, --yearly=NUM    how many yearly backups to preserve
 -i, --ionice=CLASS  use ionice to set the I/O scheduling class
 -n, --dry-run       don't make any changes, just print what would be done
 -v, --verbose       make more noise
 -h, --help          show this message and exit

The last section (see below) contains a real example that shows how rotation frequencies can be combined.

Contact

The latest version of rotate-backups is available on PyPI and GitHub. For bug reports please create an issue on GitHub. If you have questions, suggestions, etc. feel free to send me an e-mail at [e-mail].

License

This software is licensed under the MIT license.

© 2014 Peter Odding.

Real example

Here’s a real world example:

$ rotate-backups --hourly=24 --daily=7 --weekly=4 --monthly=12 --yearly=always sample-backups/
INFO Scanning directory for timestamped backups: sample-backups/
INFO Found 266 timestamped backups in sample-backups/.
INFO Preserving sample-backups/2013-10-10@20:07 (matches retention period(s) 'monthly' and 'yearly') ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-10-11@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-10-12@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-10-13@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-10-14@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-10-15@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-10-16@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-10-17@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-10-18@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-10-19@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-10-20@20:05 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-10-21@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-10-22@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-10-23@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-10-24@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-10-25@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-10-26@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-10-27@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-10-28@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-10-29@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-10-30@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-10-31@20:07 ..
INFO Preserving sample-backups/2013-11-01@20:06 (matches retention period(s) 'monthly') ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-11-02@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-11-03@20:05 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-11-04@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-11-05@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-11-06@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-11-07@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-11-08@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-11-09@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-11-10@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-11-11@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-11-12@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-11-13@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-11-14@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-11-15@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-11-16@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-11-17@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-11-18@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-11-19@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-11-20@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-11-21@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-11-22@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-11-23@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-11-24@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-11-25@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-11-26@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-11-27@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-11-28@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-11-29@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-11-30@20:06 ..
INFO Preserving sample-backups/2013-12-01@20:07 (matches retention period(s) 'monthly') ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-12-02@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-12-03@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-12-04@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-12-05@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-12-06@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-12-07@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-12-08@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-12-09@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-12-10@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-12-11@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-12-12@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-12-13@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-12-14@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-12-15@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-12-16@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-12-17@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-12-18@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-12-19@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-12-20@20:08 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-12-21@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-12-22@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-12-23@20:08 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-12-24@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-12-25@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-12-26@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-12-27@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-12-28@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-12-29@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-12-30@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2013-12-31@20:06 ..
INFO Preserving sample-backups/2014-01-01@20:07 (matches retention period(s) 'monthly' and 'yearly') ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-01-02@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-01-03@20:08 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-01-04@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-01-05@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-01-06@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-01-07@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-01-08@20:09 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-01-09@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-01-10@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-01-11@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-01-12@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-01-13@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-01-14@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-01-15@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-01-16@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-01-17@20:04 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-01-18@20:02 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-01-19@20:02 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-01-20@20:04 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-01-21@20:04 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-01-22@20:04 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-01-23@20:05 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-01-24@20:08 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-01-25@20:03 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-01-26@20:02 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-01-27@20:08 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-01-28@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-01-29@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-01-30@20:08 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-01-31@20:04 ..
INFO Preserving sample-backups/2014-02-01@20:05 (matches retention period(s) 'monthly') ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-02-02@20:03 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-02-03@20:05 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-02-04@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-02-05@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-02-06@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-02-07@20:05 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-02-08@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-02-09@20:04 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-02-10@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-02-11@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-02-12@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-02-13@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-02-14@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-02-15@20:05 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-02-16@20:04 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-02-17@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-02-18@20:04 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-02-19@20:08 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-02-20@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-02-21@20:07 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-02-22@20:05 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-02-23@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-02-24@20:05 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-02-25@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-02-26@20:04 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-02-27@20:05 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-02-28@20:03 ..
INFO Preserving sample-backups/2014-03-01@20:04 (matches retention period(s) 'monthly') ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-03-02@20:01 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-03-03@20:05 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-03-04@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-03-05@20:05 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-03-06@20:24 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-03-07@20:03 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-03-08@20:04 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-03-09@20:01 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-03-10@20:05 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-03-11@20:05 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-03-12@20:05 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-03-13@20:05 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-03-14@20:04 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-03-15@20:04 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-03-16@20:02 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-03-17@20:04 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-03-18@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-03-19@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-03-20@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-03-21@20:04 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-03-22@20:03 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-03-23@20:01 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-03-24@20:03 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-03-25@20:05 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-03-26@20:03 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-03-27@20:04 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-03-28@20:03 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-03-29@20:03 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-03-30@20:01 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-03-31@20:04 ..
INFO Preserving sample-backups/2014-04-01@20:03 (matches retention period(s) 'monthly') ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-04-02@20:05 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-04-03@20:03 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-04-04@20:04 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-04-05@20:02 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-04-06@20:02 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-04-07@20:02 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-04-08@20:04 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-04-09@20:04 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-04-10@20:04 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-04-11@20:04 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-04-12@20:03 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-04-13@20:01 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-04-14@20:05 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-04-15@20:05 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-04-16@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-04-17@20:05 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-04-18@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-04-19@20:02 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-04-20@20:01 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-04-21@20:01 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-04-22@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-04-23@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-04-24@20:05 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-04-25@20:04 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-04-26@20:02 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-04-27@20:02 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-04-28@20:05 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-04-29@20:05 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-04-30@20:05 ..
INFO Preserving sample-backups/2014-05-01@20:06 (matches retention period(s) 'monthly') ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-05-02@20:05 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-05-03@20:03 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-05-04@20:01 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-05-05@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-05-06@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-05-07@20:05 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-05-08@20:03 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-05-09@20:01 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-05-10@20:01 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-05-11@20:01 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-05-12@20:05 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-05-13@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-05-14@20:04 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-05-15@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-05-16@20:05 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-05-17@20:02 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-05-18@20:01 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-05-19@20:02 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-05-20@20:04 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-05-21@20:03 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-05-22@20:02 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-05-23@20:02 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-05-24@20:01 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-05-25@20:01 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-05-26@20:05 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-05-27@20:03 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-05-28@20:03 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-05-29@20:01 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-05-30@20:02 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-05-31@20:02 ..
INFO Preserving sample-backups/2014-06-01@20:01 (matches retention period(s) 'monthly') ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-06-02@20:05 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-06-03@20:02 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-06-04@20:03 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-06-05@20:03 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-06-06@20:02 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-06-07@20:01 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-06-08@20:01 ..
INFO Preserving sample-backups/2014-06-09@20:01 (matches retention period(s) 'weekly') ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-06-10@20:02 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-06-11@20:02 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-06-12@20:03 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-06-13@20:05 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-06-14@20:01 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-06-15@20:01 ..
INFO Preserving sample-backups/2014-06-16@20:02 (matches retention period(s) 'weekly') ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-06-17@20:01 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-06-18@20:01 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-06-19@20:04 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-06-20@20:02 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-06-21@20:02 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-06-22@20:01 ..
INFO Preserving sample-backups/2014-06-23@20:04 (matches retention period(s) 'weekly') ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-06-24@20:06 ..
INFO Deleting directory sample-backups/2014-06-25@20:03 ..
INFO Preserving sample-backups/2014-06-26@20:04 (matches retention period(s) 'daily') ..
INFO Preserving sample-backups/2014-06-27@20:02 (matches retention period(s) 'daily') ..
INFO Preserving sample-backups/2014-06-28@20:02 (matches retention period(s) 'daily') ..
INFO Preserving sample-backups/2014-06-29@20:01 (matches retention period(s) 'daily') ..
INFO Preserving sample-backups/2014-06-30@20:03 (matches retention period(s) 'daily' and 'weekly') ..
INFO Preserving sample-backups/2014-07-01@20:02 (matches retention period(s) 'daily' and 'monthly') ..
INFO Preserving sample-backups/2014-07-02@20:03 (matches retention period(s) 'hourly' and 'daily') ..