[PLUG] Cron advice needed

David dafr+plug at dafr.us
Tue Apr 26 23:22:45 UTC 2016


On 04/26/2016 04:05 PM, John Jason Jordan wrote:
> On Tue, 26 Apr 2016 11:53:52 -0700
> Paul Mullen <pm at nellump.net> dijo:
>
>> This is a job for rsync, anyhow.  The following command should do
>> exactly what you want:
>>
>>   rsync -avx /home/jjj/Mail/ /media/jjj/Data/Mail
>>
>> Don't remove the trailing slash on the source path.  It tells rsync to
>> copy the contents of /home/jjj/Mail to /media/jjj/Data/Mail/, as
>> opposed to creating a new Mail dir under /media/jjj/Data/Mail/ (i.e.,
>> /media/jjj/Data/Mail/Mail).  The rsync man page has more details under
>> the "Usage" section.
>>
>> rsync has a dry run mode that will show you the changes it would
>> normally perform without actually making any.  Just add the "-n"
>> option to the command line.
>
> I thought of rsync too, but the advice from the Claws-Mail listserve
> included the cp command, so that's what I used.
>
> The above command works, except that it does not remove mails from the
> backup that have been deleted from the source.
>
> I have a couple dozen folders where I store mails that I want to save.
> However, I leave mail in the Inbox until the thread has exhausted
> itself, and then, if I think I want to save the thread for future
> reference, I move it manually to one of my storage folders. If I don't
> want to save it I just delete the mails from my Inbox. Either way, those
> mails are no longer in the Inbox, so I don't want them populating my
> backup Inbox. Otherwise the backup Inbox is going to end up with many
> thousands of mails in it. And if I needed to restore my Inbox I'd never
> be able to figure out which ones of the thousands to restore.
>
> And the same thing will happen with my storage folders. I don't delete
> mails from them as much, but occasionally I do a housekeeping and throw
> out stuff that I think I will never need again. I don't want them to
> keep growing until they choke my backup into uselessness.
>
> I might be able to figure out how to change the command to accomplish
> what I want, but I'm scared of rsync and its man page. :(

You probably would benefit from the --delete flag. From the man page, 
this flag will "delete extraneous files from dest dirs" which I believe 
is what you want to accomplish.

dafr





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