Use flow to delete old backups (files in general) in folder

ℹ️ Support
1

The question is independant of my nextcloud installation, so I skip the support/intro part.

I have several folders where backups of whattsapp, signal and threema are uploaded to. Thats 2,4 GB per day or files. I would like to keep only the newest 3 backups. Can I realize this with flow?
So everything in the folder but the 3 newest files should be deleted. The deletion or check should be done every day.

grafik
grafik1419×420 13.1 KB

2

How do you want to trigger something daily in Flow? The easiest way would be to start a cron job for such a simple task that needs to be done daily.

The cron job should be run as your nextcloud webserver user (www-data)

This could be the script that does the cleanup (adapt the variables to your need):

#!/bin/bash
# This script should be run once per day as the webserver user (www-data) by cron

NC_DIR="/var/www/nextcloud"
NC_DATADIR="/var/www/nextcloud/data"
USER_ID="tom"
PATH="backups"
PATTERN=(
    "signal"
    "whatsapp"
    "threema"
)

# Check if the directory exists
if [ ! -d "$NC_DATADIR/$USER_ID/$PATH" ]; then
    echo "Directory does not exist: $NC_DATADIR/$USER_ID/$PATH"
    exit 1
fi

# Change to the directory
cd "$NC_DATADIR/$USER_ID/$PATH" || exit

# Check if files exist that can be deleted
for pattern in "${PATTERN[@]}"; do
    files_to_delete=($(ls -1t $pattern-*.backup 2>/dev/null))
    if [ ${#files_to_delete[@]} -gt 3 ]; then
        # Delete older files
        echo "Deleting older files for pattern: $pattern"
        echo "${files_to_delete[@]:3}" | xargs rm
    fi
done

# Run the Nextcloud scan command
php -f "$NC_DIR/occ" files:scan --path=$USER_ID/$PATH

That’s pretty much how I would do it but you have to test it yourself thoroughly before you run it as a cron job. I would test it on test files to not make it delete valuable data :wink:

Much and good luck,
ernolf