Delete old backup prior to new backup

[gob]

Hi

I have proxmox doing snapshot backups to a series of 1Tb hotswap USB disks which get rotated each night. This has been working fine until the backup job grew over 500Gb. As VZdump deletes the old backup after a successful backup we are running out of space each night and have to manually go in and delete the old backup each day to get a successful backup.

We currently have Max Backups set to 1 on the USB storage. If we set that to 0 does that disable the Max Backups threshold and not remove any? or would that delete the old backup file first?

I have come across the VZdump hool script option so I guess I could create a script that runs at job-start to remove the old backup prior to running the backup.

I just wondered if there is another way to automate this and will this break if somebody tweaks the backup job in the gui?

Many thanks

 

[manu]

Hi
If we set that to 0 does that disable the Max Backups threshold and not remove any? or would that delete the old backup file first?

Yes maxfiles=0 means unlimited backup.

Erasing the previous backup to make room for a new one is dangerous if you have only one backup backup.
Buy a bigger external hard drive !

 

[gob]

Yes, I understand that "Erasing the previous backup to make room for a new one is dangerous", however as I mentioned in the post, the disks are rotated so there will be 4 newer backups at the point when we delete the old backup. This is an acceptable risk to us.

 

[vkhera]

In that case your best bet is to make your script that mounts the drive delete its contents.

 

[gob]

Thanks for your reply vkhera.
My customer has decided to purchase larger disks for their backup so for the time being the problem is resolved.