Is there any reason Backup & Migrate leaves all the .info files around?

Question

I just discovered that there are hundreds of .info files left lying around in the folder that the Backup & Migrate module uses for scheduled backups, while only 12 of these have a corresponding .gz file.

Is there a reason to keep these? Do they have any real value?

Answer 1

There doesn't appear to be any value to keeping them. To get rid of them, you can do something like this

cd /private/backup_migrate/scheduled  # where ever you keep this
for file in *.info; do gz_file=`echo "$file" | sed -e 's/.info//'`; if [[ ! -f "${gz_file}" ]]; then rm -f "${file}"; fi; done

This will preserve all *.info files that correspond to a *.gz file, and delete the rest. It appears to be an oversight on the part of the Backup & Migrate module to leave all of these lying around. (Apologies in advance to the module's maintainers if I'm mistaken on this: I do not mean to be critical, and I appreciate your work!)

If you want to wrap all this up into a quick alias or function, you can put something like this into your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc or whatever:

function cleanup_backups(){ 
  pushd /<youfillinthispart>/private/backup_migrate/scheduled
  for file in *.info; do
    gz_file=`echo "$file" | sed -e 's/.info//'` 
    if [[ ! -f "${gz_file}" ]]; then
      rm -f "${file}"
    fi
  done
  pushd
}

(You'll have to make it a bit more complicated if you have subdirectories in your scheduled backups folder, but this should get you started.)