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Prune Dropbox backups safely (age-based retention + minimum keep).

2 starsShell

Dropbox Cleaner – prune old Dropbox backups with Bash

by e-gockel·Mar 7, 2026·1 point·0 comments
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AI Analysis

●●SolidSolve My ProblemNiche Gem

Dual-threshold Dropbox retention (age + count) in pure Bash with dry-run safety, solves real pain.

Strengths
  • •No Dropbox API dependency; delegates to Dropbox-Uploader, keeping it lightweight and portable.
  • •Safety logic is bulletproof: guarantees minimum retention even if jobs fail, hard floor on deletions.
  • •Cron-friendly with dry-run mode and clear logging; explicitly designed for multi-client deployment.
Weaknesses
  • •Filename-date parsing is rigid (YYYY.MM.DD format only); doesn't tap Dropbox metadata.
  • •Requires external Dropbox-Uploader setup; integration burden for new users.
Target Audience

DevOps engineers with cron-based Dropbox backup pipelines, database admins managing retention at scale

Similar To

restic · Duplicacy · Veeam Backup & Replication

Post Description

Built this for cron-based backup setups where DB dumps get pushed to Dropbox and pile up over time. It prunes backups only if they’re older than a configured threshold and not among the newest N files, so a minimum recent set is always retained. Bash only, no Dropbox API.

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