Recommended retention policy

#1

I’m currently setting up Duplicacy for the first time and now up to adding the pruning job to the schedule. I’m using the web interface.

Can anyone recommend a retention policy? I’m mainly backing up photos/videos, tax files, documents etc.

Ideally, I’d like all these files to be kept indefinitely (unless I delete them from my computer), but still be able to access them after say, a year, in case something gets accidentally deleted.

Currently, the amount of data being backed up is about 560Gb. I’m backing up to a secondary local drive, pruning, then copying to OneDrive (1Tb).

If I prune the local backups, will all the snapshots that exist locally also exist on one OneDrive? Or does the Copy job only copy the current snapshot?

#2

The Duplicacy copy command backs up all the snapshots by default.

You can (with the CLI) specify individual IDs but currently, there’s no way to specify say the last revisions for each repository, without scripting - which you can’t do in the GUI…

Also, when you prune the local storage, it’s best to use exactly the same prune command on your OneDrive.

Otherwise you’ll have irregular holes that don’t match up between storages. Then what happens is already-pruned snapshots get re-copied and another prune of local+remote recreates the same mismatches. And the cycle continues. So whatever you do, if you’re using Duplicacy’s copy, always prune both storages with the same policy at the same time.

Unless you choose not to prune your remote backup with a retention policy, which you can choose to do. Or remove only the old snapshots using the same oldest -keep rule.

I can’t say what you should use, but here’s some ideas:

-keep 30:365 -keep 7:90 -keep 1:7	#crashplan's default

-keep 0:1800 -keep 7:30 -keep 1:3	#duplicacy's legacy gui default

-keep 30:365 -keep 7:90 -keep 1:14	#my personal, backups run every 2 hours
3 Likes
Bug in Schedules(?) / Good prune/check settings?
#3

Cheers Droolio. I didn’t think to check what policy I had in place with CrashPlan.

And thanks for the tip about pruning the cloud backup.

1 Like
#4

Dup
Dup.jpg1577×975 135 KB

This is how I currently have my schedule set up.

Does it look OK?