Prune with snapshot specific settings?

[thePanz]

This is my usecase:

• I backup different areas of a server with Rustic (from personal data, to other projects)
• Some of the snapshots should be kept with a shorter retention period.

Is it possible to define the [forget] and apply the retention differently per-snapshot?

Example:

• keep all snapshots: 3 per month, 1 per year
• snapshots with tags tag1: only keep the last 2

Is it currently possible? if yes, I wasn't able to find an example or I got lost in the docs 😓
Any advice here?

[kapitainsky]

Is it possible to define the [forget] and apply the retention differently per-snapshot?

Yes. rustic forget can operate on subset of all snapshots by using filters (see rustic forget --help for what is available). For example:

rustic forget ... --filter-tags MYTAG

As for your example:

Example:

* keep all snapshots: 3 per month, 1 per year

* snapshots with tags `tag1`: only keep the last 2

You can NOT have forget rule for "a week and a half":) - or whatever period of time which would slice month in three. The closest available is weekly.

Assign two different tags to your snapshots. And then you can run 2 filtered forget commands operating on different snapshots' subsets.

rustic forget --keep-within-weekly 1m --keep-yearly -1 --filter-tags ALLTAG
rustic forget --keep-last 2 --filter-tags TAG1

I assume that by "all" you mean everything but "tag1". Otherwise it is not logical:)

Always use --dry-run for testing and experimenting.

[thePanz]

Thanks, would it be possible to define such filtering on the .toml config file?

I have the general forget setting in such config, and would like to have (for a specific TAG) a different "forgetting" config.

I will try with the CLI for now, thank you for your suggestion 👍

[kapitainsky]

Thanks, would it be possible to define such filtering on the .toml config file?

I think so. See:

rustic/config/full.toml

Lines 205 to 246 in 3d6ae64

	# forget options
	[forget]
	prune = false
	group-by = "host,label,paths" # Can be any combination of host,label,paths,tags
	# The following filter options can be also defined here and then overwrite the options for the forget command
	filter-hosts = ["host1", "host2"] # Default: []
	filter-labels = ["label1", "label2"] # Default: []
	filter-tags = ["tag1,tag2", "tag3"] # Default: []
	filter-tags-exact = ["tag1,tag2", "tag2"] # Default: []
	filter-paths = ["path1", "path2,path3"] # Default: []
	filter-paths-exact = ["path1", "path2,path3"] # Default: []
	filter-after = "2024-01-01" # Default: not set
	filter-before = "2024-02-05 12:15" # Default: not set
	filter-size = "200MiB" # Default: not set
	filter-size-added = "1 MB..10MB" # Default: not set
	filter-jq = '.description | contains ("test")' # Default: no jq filter function
	filter-last = "5" # Default: not set
	# The retention options follow. All of these are not set by default.
	keep-tags = ["tag1", "tag2,tag3"] # Default: not set
	keep-ids = [
	"123abc",
	"11122233",
	] # Keep all snapshots whose ID starts with any of these strings, default: not set
	keep-last = 0
	keep-minutely = 10
	keep-hourly = 5
	keep-daily = 3
	keep-weekly = 0
	keep-monthly = 0
	keep-quarter-yearly = 0
	keep-half-yearly = 0
	keep-yearly = 10
	keep-within = "0s"
	keep-within-minutely = "2 hours"
	keep-within-hourly = "3 days"
	keep-within-daily = "0 seconds"
	keep-within-weekly = "2 months"
	keep-within-monthly = "1 year"
	keep-within-quarter-yearly = "0 year"
	keep-within-half-yearly = "1 year"
	keep-within-yearly = "10 years"
	delete-unchanged = false

I have never done it this way so you have to try to experiment a bit:) Maybe it is possible to repeat this section multiple times with different grouping/filters.

[aawsome]

Hi @thePanz
You cannot apply multiple filtering with policies in the same forget run, but you can use multiple forget run to accomplish this. It is also possible that you create separate toml profiles and then use them in the forget, e.g.
rustic -P profile1 forget && rustic -P profile2 forget

Common settings in both profiles (like repo information) can be stored in a third profile which can be included in both using

use-profiles = ["common-settings"]