Expiring Trees in Dirvish

We've taken to using Dirvish to back up files here at work. It's similar to Apple's Time Machine backup mechanism: hard links provide directory snapshots while preserving disk space. This is most effective when most of your files are static, as the hard links can share these files across all your snapshots without using any additional disk space.

I didn't find any documentation on expiring trees before their time, so: yes, you can edit a simple text file and expire a tree early. (Honestly, it may be acceptable to rm -rf a tree; I really don't know. I'd rather let dirvish-expire do whatever cleanup it has to do, not being familiar with the code.) I happen to be removing some trees that didn't back up correctly, as general maintenance.

Each backup tree contains a "summary" file. This file includes an Expire line:

Expire: +14 days == 2008-03-30 02:06:38

My original expire-rule expanded to 14 days from the date of backup, which was March 30. If I want to delete the tree right now, I can change the date after the equality test:

Expire: +14 days == 2007-03-30 02:06:38

Anything in the past is sufficient. Run dirvish-expire, and the tree will drop out of your vault.