Bash – Deleting all folders older than a specified date, except some of them

You could send a series of commands to lftp and wrap it in a shell script which calculates the filename of the too old files (see the script below).

TODAY=$(date --iso)                   # Today's date like YYYY-MM-DD
RMDATE=$(date --iso -d '6 days ago')  # TODAY minus X days - too old files
FTPUSER=username
FTPPW=password                        # Better load this from an encrypted file
FTPSERVER=FQDN_or_IP
LFTP=/usr/bin/lftp                    # Path to binary
TMPDIR=$(mktemp -d)                   # Your archives are here

# CAUTION: mput -E deletes local files after upload
echo -n "Uploading files via FTP... "
$LFTP << EOF
open ${FTPUSER}:${FTPPW}@${FTPSERVER}
cd backups/${HOSTNAME}
mkdir ${TODAY}
cd ${TODAY}
mput -E ${TMPDIR}/*
cd ..
rm -rf ${RMDATE}
bye
EOF
echo "Done."

Make sure nobody execpt root can read this script or put the credentials somewhere else. TMPDIR is the directory where the backups reside locally. Of course you need to edit the obivous parts.

HTH,
PEra

The data=writeback mount option deserves to be tried, in order to prevent journaling of the file system. This should be done only during the deletion time, there is a risk however if the server is being shutdown or rebooted during the delete operation.

According to this page,

Some applications show very significant speed improvement when it is used. For example, speed improvements can be seen (...) when applications create and delete large volumes of small files.

The option is set either in fstab or during the mount operation, replacing data=ordered with data=writeback. The file system containing the files to be deleted has to be remounted.