How to use Duplicacy on windows to prune ESXi backups from Vertical Backup

[DevinDeFrisco]

I have Vertical Backup on an ESXi host in a datacenter. It runs nightly to backup to a windows pc I have running in my house through SFTP. I read that I should be using Duplicacy to prune these backups so I purchased it and installed it on the local windows PC. I cannot figure out how to prune the backups that Vertical Backup is writing to the PC… I can see a way to use Duplicacy to take a backup and prune its own backups but I can’t see a way to have it prune Vertical Backup’s backups.

How do I do this? Also how do I set this up to happen automatically?

[gchen]

You don’t need to buy the GUI license for pruning ESXi backups – what we actually recommended is the CLI version, which can be used to prune ESXi backups without a license, even for commercial purposes.

However, if you prefer a GUI, then you can use the GUI version to back up an empty directory to the same storage that your ESXi backups go to, and then when the GUI version runs the prune command it will prune all backups on the storage, including those from ESXi.

[DevinDeFrisco]

oh ok. How would I do it using the CLI version? is it the same process as the GUI where I backup an empty directory and prune it? I like the idea of offloading the pruning operation because my ESXi is always tight on memory and space.

[gchen]

It is the same process as the GUI, but you don’t actually need the backup:

mkdir /path/to/dummy/repository
cd /path/to/dummy/repository
duplicacy init dummy storage_url
duplicacy prune -a -keep 0:360 -keep 30:180 -keep 7:30 -keep 1:7

Please refer to the wiki page for the details on specifying the retention policy.

If you don’t need the GUI version, please let me know and I’ll issue a refund.

[DevinDeFrisco]

Thanks! And I am fine with paying for the GUI version because I want to support good development and also I may use it sometime in the future.