Taking an eg of Daily snapshots: 7 does this mean if there are more than 7 snapshots, kopia deletes them as part of maintenance even if user has not selected them for deletion?
I am looking at a solution where I don’t want to delete the backups based on these policies but the user decides when he wants to do it. Does this get affected by the above policies?
If the resp. user is connected to the repo, Kopia can be used to add more policies and those can overwrite the global one. So yes, a user can change the snapshot retensions for their snapshots. However, depending on the skills of your users, this is maybe not a wise thing to do. Regular users tend to be razher confused by the concepts deployed in Kopia’s policies.
It’s probably better to delegate this kind of work to a “repo administrator”.
Thanks for the reply. What i am trying to understand here what does the below indicate?
Does this mean snapshots are automatically deleted after 7 days even without user triggering a delete?
Are these retention policies run as part of maintenance (i assume so)?
Well… yes. If you take daily snapshots, the default policy will remove snapshots which are older than 7days. Keep in mind, that the other retensions also affect this. If you want to have, e.g. the snapshots of the last 30 days available, you can do that.
Hourly snapshots: 48 (does this mean snapshots that are older than 48hrs are deleted)?
Annual snapshots: 3 (does this mean snapshots older than 3years are deleted) ?
Weekly snapshots: 4 (does this mean snapshots older than 4 weeks are deleted)?
Correct me if I am wrong here on the understanding.
Also is there a kopia command to disable all these policies? In my case I want the backups to be forever and the user would decide when he wants to delete the same.
Each retension “class” operates on their “natural” boundary. Hourly snapshots refer to hours, daily snapshots to day with the reference being UTC. Weekly, monthly and yearly… well you get the idea.
Now, a snapshot can and will be honored by at least one, but often more policies. Only when a snapshot is not targeted by any policy it gets deleted. From a purely practical standpoint I’d state, that having the user(s) deleting their snapshots on their own is a recipe for desaster, but hey… to each their own.
You can always push the daily retension to 9999 and have the latest 9999 daily snaps available. This policy will always superceed all other policies, which may employ lesser retension times.