Questions about settings and storage used

General Topics
1

I’m currently using Kopia to backup important things from my homelab to a cloud provider. It all is working fine, but there’s a couple things I’m not entirely understanding:

  1. Right now, I backup 4 directories using 4 policies, which all share the same global policy settings. I’m taking hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and annual snapshots. Currently, Kopia reports that those 4 directories take up 296GB of space. However in the cloud provider where I’m backing up to, those sam files are utilizing 2.1TB of space. How is this possible if the snapshots are incremental and deduplicated? Is it because each “type” of snapshot (daily, weekly, monthly, etc) is stored entirely separately from each other? If so, that might explain 1.5 TB of the space, and then presumably the other 600GB is from retention policies where the files evolved over time

  2. In the Kopia settings, there’s a Snapshot Frequency setting which I am not using. I don’t quite understand what this does though. If there are hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly snapshots, aren’t those the frequencies?

2

Well I may have answered my own question for #1. I enabled “Keep only the last version” in Backblaze and after a day, it dropped the used storage from 2.1TB to 438GB!

Still curious about #2 though!

3

I don’t think Kopia has a schedule to do snapshots as hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly. Those are retention policy.
Kopia only has a flat schedule schedule maximum waiting time as 12 hours to trigger next snapshot.