Forgetting old backup generations ================================= Every time you make a backup, your backup repository grows in size. To avoid overflowing all available storage, you need to get rid of some old backups. That's a bit of a dilemma, of course: you make backups in order to not lose data and now you have to do exactly that. Obnam uses the term "forget" about removing a backup generation. You can specify which generation to remove manually, by generation identifier, or you can have a schedule to forget them automatically. To forget a specific generation: obnam forget 2 (This example assumes you have a configuration file that Obnam finds automatically, and that you don't need to specify things like repository location or encryption on the command line.) You can forget any individual generation. Thanks to the way Obnam treats every generation as an independent snapshot (except it's not really a full backup every time), you don't have to worry about the distinctions between a full and incremental backup. Forgetting backups manually is tedious, and you probably want to use a schedule to have Obnam automatically pick the generations to forget. A common type of schedule is something like this: * keep one backup for each day for the past week * keep one backup for each week for the past three months * keep one backup for each month for the past two years * keep one backup for each year for the past fifty seven years Obnam uses the `--keep` setting to specify a schedule. The setting for the above schedule would look like this: --keep 7d,15w,24m,57y This isn't an exact match, due to the unfortunate ambiguity of how long a month is in weeks, but it's close enough. The setting "7d" is interpreted as "the last backup of each calendar day for the last seven days on which backups were made". Similarly for the other parts of the schedule. See the "Obnam configuration files and settings" chapter for exact details. The schedule picks a set of generations to keep. Everything else gets forgotten. Choosing a schedule for forgetting generations ---------------------------------------------- The schedule for retiring backup generations is a bit of a guessing game, just like backups in general. If you could reliably tell the future, you'd know all the disasters that threaten your data, and you could backup only the things that would otherwise be lost in the future. In this reality, alas, you have to guess. You need to think about what risks you're facing (or your data is), and how much backup storage space you're willing to spend on protecting against them. * Are you afraid of your hard drive suddenly failing in a very spectacular way, such as by catching fire or being stolen? If so, you really only need one very recent backup to cover against that. * Do you worry about your hard drive, or filesystem, or your application programs, or you yourself, slowly corrupting your data over a longer period of time? How long will it take you to find that out? You need a backup history that lasts longer than it takes for you to detect slow corruption. * Likewise with accidental deletion of files. How long will it take for you to notice? That's how long the backup history should be, at minimum. There's other criteria as well. For example, would you like to see, in fifty years, how your files are laid out today? If so, you need a fifty-year-old backup, plus perhaps a backup from each year, if you want to compare how things were each year in between. With increasing storage space and nice de-duplication features, this isn't quite as expensive as it might be. There is no one schedule that fits everyone's needs and wants. You have to decide for yourself. That's why the default in Obnam is to keep everything forever. It's not Obnam's duty to decide that you should not keep this or that backup generation.