How can I keep just one previous version of each file always available?

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#1

I’m maybe just being an idiot here but I’m just not really understanding the “Keep a revision every 7 days for revisions older than 30 days” naming in the documentation, the 30 days part makes sense but where does the “every 7 days” come into it?

I’m basically just looking to consistently only have 1 previous version of each edited file at any time, and probably deleting the previous version after 180 days. The last part is simple enough, I’m guessing that would just be -keep 0:180, but I’m not really inderstanding how to set up the first part.

I’m guessing maybe just -keep 1:1 or 1:0, but I’ve got no idea if that’s actually right at all. Any help on this would be appreciated!

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#2

This would be -keep 7:30. All revisions older the 30 days will be removed, except one very 7 days.

I would recommend against doing that. What if you find a corruption/error/whatever that happened few revisions before? Extra revisions don’t cost you much in storage space at all. You can store 329939 revisions, and if the file did not change, virtually no additional space will be used.

If you only want to store one revision it’s not a backup, it’s just a copy of your data elsewhere.

Duplicacy’s -keep functionality operates on dates, not number of revisions.

You could of course do something like -keep 0:0 – and duplicacy will always retain at least one revision, accomplishing your goal. But I haven’t tried that, and I cant’t recommend strongly enough against such a short version history.

Maybe if you describe your usecase in more details, and what are you trying to accomplish on the high level, that requires you to have just one revision at all times, we’ll be able to give you more tailored guidance?

#3

Hey there, sorry about the slow reply, only just catching up on this! Thanks so much for the detailed info, I’ve got a lot of video files which are included in the backup so I was a little worried about any edits to those videos building up over time and taking up huge amounts of storage.

Is there any usual setup people tend to use with larger files like that to balance storage usage with version history? I think you’re right in that only having one previous version isn’t a great plan long-term, I just don’t want the storage spiraling out of control either though.