How to prevent certain snapshots from being pruned?

Support
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#1

Hi !

I am looking for a way to permanently keep certain snapshots forever. I want to exclude them from a prune command. The reason/background: I restored parts of a backup from computer “A” to a different computer “B” and will only perform backups from this computer “B” from now on. The parts of the backup which I havent restored should still be available in the backup, but since I will not backup them anymore from the computer (they are not available on computer “B”), they would be pruned depending on the retention policy.

Is there a way to achieve this?

EDIT: Sorry, I should have mentioned: I want to use retention policies.

Thanks a lot for this great piece of software!

#2

In the GUI version, I don’t think this can be done as yet. With the CLI, I believe you can do this with the -ignore option, but double-check with -dry-run because the language in the Prune command details isn’t entirely clear to me.

#3

You can use the -tag option to apply the retention policy to snapshots with the given tag only.

The -ignore option is used by the lock-free deduplication algorithm to exclude inactive hosts so the fossil deletion step can be advanced.

But there may be a simple solution in you case, if computer “A” has only only backup, then you can change the repository id on “B” after restoring parts of the backup on “B”. Duplicacy will not prune the last snapshot from each repository id. Therefore, any retention policy will not prune the only snapshot on “A”.

#4

That sounds exactly what I’d like to do: I will just change the repository id for any future backups from “B”. In the prune command I will then use retention policies and the -id command, so that only the new snapshots with new repository id are touched. This way even all the old revisions of “A” are kept, and not only the last one, right?
Thank you very much!

In my first attempts, I tried to only consider future revisions with “-r X-999999” (with X-1 being the last snapshot revision of computer “A”), but duplicacy told me that “Tags or retention policy will be ignored if at least one revision is specified”. As a small side note: this could maybe be improved in the documentation where it is stated that “Snapshots to be deleted can be specified by revision numbers, by a tag, by retention policies, or by any combination of them.” But this is only a minor thing.

Again, thanks a lot! This software beats any other backup solution for me with all the CLI options.