Capture directory & contents, Rotate for only the last three days

Question

Our current backup approach requires us to capture a Tomcat directory, and all it's contents. The rationale is the backup makes redeployment easier in the event of a disaster.

It was rotating based on the day number, so we'd have a rolling week of backups. Problem is that these are eating too much diskspace, and we really don't need that much history.

I looked at logrotate, but it seems to be set for specific log files. Is there some way of making logrotate capture a directory & contents, providing three rolling days history? Or is there a better alternative?

Answer 1

I've had similar requirements. My solution was backup a daily backup to a dir, then prune based on date.

find /path/to/backups/ -name 'tomcat*.tar.bz2' -atime +3 -mtime +3 -exec rm {} \;
DATE=$(date '+%Y-%m-%d')
tar -C /path/to/tomcat/root -cjvf /path/to/backups/tomcat-${DATE}.tar.bz2 .

Obviously, put this in cron. Run once daily.

Answer 2

What about using the -u option of tar (updates only newer files), and compressing the file every week?

Also think about this: is really disk space such a big issue? Given how little hard drives cost lately, is an hour of your time worth doing this compared to the cost of buying a TB of space and forgetting about it?