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It would be nice if I could tell fileprune to keep deleting file until n bytes are free on the file system – this seems to be the most natural choice for backups on a dedicated disk. This would also go well with pruning directories (issue #1) even without having a reliable way of calculating the spaces used by a directory.

I might not trust my file system meta data always and might not want to risk fileprune to delete all my backjust just because I accidentally ran touch *. As often the directories are named by $(date -R) or something similar, it would be nice if fileprune would take a strptime pattern and apply that to the file name to get the file’s age.

(JFTR, this ways already reported by mail).

It would be nice if fileprune was able to prune whole directories. This would probably not go well with with the size constraint (-s), but otherwise it should work.

The setting fileprune -e 1.25 works well for my backups which I do daily. But a backup that is only done occasional, I find the results surprising:

        2015-03-23.20h58
        2015-05-01.09h41
        2015-08-09.16h04
        2015-09-28.22h51
        2015-11-29.19h16
        2016-01-02.18h59
        2016-02-10.23h26
        2016-02-28.11h58
        2016-03-17.11h51
        2016-04-07.19h16
        2016-05-14.20h59
        2016-05-24.13h25
2016-05-31.19h39
2016-06-06.12h37
2016-06-28.10h29

The first column lists backups retained, while the second backups deleted. Why does it delete all those backups?

Hi,

in certain circumstances, fileprune seems to be happy to delete the youngest backup. This is most likely not what you want, e.g. if there is a symbolic link pointing to the "latest" which is used as a source for rsync --link-dest. Maybe that should be special-cased?

(I’m still using my own fork which can handle directories and stuff, so if this does not apply to the mainline, sorry.)

Greetings,
Joachim