Automatic Deletion of Backups
To prevent excessive consumption of disk space, Emacs can delete numbered
backup versions automatically. Generally Emacs keeps the first few backups
and the latest few backups, deleting any in between. This happens every
time a new backup is made.
The two variables kept-old-versions and
kept-new-versions control this deletion. Their values are,
respectively, the number of oldest (lowest-numbered) backups to keep
and the number of newest (highest-numbered) ones to keep, each time a
new backup is made. The backups in the middle (excluding those oldest
and newest) are the excess middle versions--those backups are
deleted. These variables' values are used when it is time to delete
excess versions, just after a new backup version is made; the newly
made backup is included in the count in kept-new-versions. By
default, both variables are 2.
If delete-old-versions is non-nil, Emacs deletes the
excess backup files silently. If it is nil, the default, Emacs
asks you whether it should delete the excess backup versions.
Dired's . (Period) command can also be used to delete old versions.
See Dired Deletion.
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