Mirror command - delete first, then copy

[jbartlett]

One thing I liked about BC2 was that when I backed up (mirror) directories, it would perform the deletes before performing the copies. This is sound behavior because it frees up the file space before copying new & updated files. If you're mirroring directories with files in the gigabyte range, this can be beneficial.

BC3 doesn't do this.

If the source and destination are of the same size and there's a bunch of new files that sort to the top of the page and deleted files that sort to the bottom, it'll copy the new files before deleting the old files and that walks you into a potential out-of-space condition.

Fortunately, my destination is five times bigger than my source.

[cwiebe]

Can you post your script that should do this?

[Qboy61]

jbartlett has a good point. This thread should probably not be in the "scripting" area of the forum. I just had this problem on BC4 during a folder mirroring action where I rearranged files on two 2TB drives and didn't actually add any data (actually I removed some). BC4 overran the drive/folder being copied to, before it acted to remove the files that were being removed from the target drive/folder and the mirroring failed. There may be cases when this is also an issue (you don't want files removed before being copied). It may be nice to handle this case. In the event where the size of the data being copied exceeds the size of the target storage device there may need to be a second question asked to say that BC will delete unwanted or changed files before completing the copy.

[Aaron]

Thanks. I'll update our wishlist entry to make it more general (interface or scripting) as part of the general Mirror logic. In scripting, this could be partially achieved with a series of selection and delete commands first, followed by another selection and copy. This assumes, however, that you want to copy all Orphan files (pre-delete, originally Orphan, too). Since, post-delete, all 'newer' files would then also be Orphan, along with previously orphan files.

Something like
...
expand all
select right.older.files
delete right
select left.orphan.files
copy left->right