Remove-master 0.3

Remove-master software remove files and remember them.

Remove-master works like the normal 'rm' command with the addition that cryptographically strong digests of deleted files are saved in a database.

Using the digests in the database, remove-master can automatically delete copies of already deleted files.

Remove-master consists (mainly) of three commands:

remind-rm

Delete the given files but first calculate their digests and store them in the database for later use by auto-rm.

auto-rm

Only delete files whose digests are stored by remind-rm in the database.

forget-rm

Never delete any files but remove the digests of the given files from the database so that auto-rm will no longer delete such files.

Why?

If you have collected a lot of data in the past 20 years and used many different computers and made backups of your files on many different media and now you would like to tidy up old archives including software, drivers, images and other documents, you maybe would like only decided once for every content if you would like to delete it permanently.

So when you check another ten year old CD-R or 15 year old tape you are able to delete files automatically which you decided already that they are not worth keeping.

So if you have this situation, maybe remove-master will be of interest to you. Maybe there are another applications for this tool, too.

Example

Below a small example how remove-master works. The two files a and a.copy are identical as well as b and b.copy.

$ ls -l a* b*
-rw-r--r-- 1 mroth users 128 2007-11-20 12:22 a
-rw-r--r-- 1 mroth users 128 2007-11-20 12:23 a.copy
-rw-r--r-- 1 mroth users 128 2007-11-20 12:23 b
-rw-r--r-- 1 mroth users 128 2007-11-20 12:23 b.copy

$ remind-rm --verbose *.copy
removed regular file 'a.copy'
removed regular file 'b.copy'

$ ls -l a* b*
-rw-r--r-- 1 mroth users 128 2007-11-20 12:22 a
-rw-r--r-- 1 mroth users 128 2007-11-20 12:23 b

$ forget-rm --verbose b
forget regular file 'b'

$ ls -l a* b*
-rw-r--r-- 1 mroth users 128 2007-11-20 12:22 a
-rw-r--r-- 1 mroth users 128 2007-11-20 12:23 b

$ auto-rm --verbose a b
removed regular file 'a'

$ ls -l a* b*
-rw-r--r-- 1 mroth users 128 2007-11-20 12:23 b

What's New in This Release:

· This release adds a new command called "find-rm" to search for already-deleted files.



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