Want to improve my simple site/db backup script with auto removal of old backups.

Question

I have the following simple script for backing up my website files and db. The script is run each day via a cron job.

#!/bin/sh

NOW=$(date +"%Y-%m-%d")

mysqldump --opt -h localhost -u username -p'password' dbname > /path/to/folder/backup/db-backup-$NOW.sql

gzip -f /path/to/folder/backup/db-backup-$NOW.sql

tar czf /path/to/folder/backup/web-backup-$NOW.tgz /path/to/folder/web/content/

It works great, but I don't want loads of old backups clogging my system. How can I modify the script to remove any backups older than a week when the script is run?

Answer 1

How about adding something like this:

find -ctime +7 -print0 | xargs -0 rm -v

find -ctime +7 -print0 finds all files that were changed (the c) more than 7 days ago (+7) and sends that out as a \0 separated string (-print0) which xargs -0 sends to rm -v as arguments.

Answer 2

with GNU find, you can use -delete

find /path -type f -iname "*backup*gz" -mtime +7 -delete

or you can use +; in place of xargs.

find /path -type f -iname "*backup*gz" -mtime +7 -exec rm -f "{}" +;