What happens when I delete a file on my filesystem?

Support
1

Hello! I’ve just begun using Kopia and I’m very impressed with it so far!

I was looking at the default snapshot policy. It looks like it holds quite a lot of snapshots: 48 hourly snapshots, 7 daily snapshots, 4 weekly snapshots, 24 monthly snapshots, and 3 annual snapshots. That’s quite a few and has a lot of coverage!

I had a question about how files that are set to be backed up are managed once they are deleted. It seems like, based on that snapshot policy, that almost every file that will ever exist on my computer is going to exist in the snapshots in some form for 3 years across the various monthly and yearly snapshots that will be created. For example, I do video editing - so I work with very large video files - and I would like those to be backed up on a short-term basis in case of disaster. But once I’m done with the project I might not need the files anymore. Will every video file that ever gets captured in the hourly backup thusly remain in the backup for 3 years then? If that’s the case, are there ways to “prune” every snapshot of unneeded files?

I feel like this could get extremely costly if I am not careful and could balloon over the course of those 3 years to dozens of terabytes of backed up data if I truly set it and forget it so I’m trying to determine how I wanna set up my backups based on how the software behaves.

Thanks!

2

I think your question has more to do with understanding snapshot retention policies than deletion. Here is a post that the community found very informative and the original post within that started the discussion:

3

Okay, I think I understand then - It’s then not like every file will be in there forever, files will eventually “fall out” of the snapshot as my filesystem changes over time. I totally misunderstood how retention worked too - I thought it was gonna hold 48 of my most recent hourly snapshots, not hold snapshots for 48 hours.

Now that I understand how it works a bit better I feel more comfortable with setting my own policy based on how I intend to use it - I also probably don’t need an annual backup retention probably. I set it to 10 latest/48 hour/7 day/4 week/2 month on an hourly interval, - that should be plenty of coverage and opportunity to grab things I might need, and also ensures things aren’t stuck in there for too long.