Comment 4 for bug 406765

Dan,

Those rules would be an improvement from my perspective, but I'd be concerned about someone with a tighter space requirement on their backup volume. For example, every December, you'd have to have room for 24 monthly's, and when January comes that drops back to 12.

Would it be possible to change the algorithm to count days, weeks, and months, instead of just looking at a calendar? This strategy would also move closer to allowing custom schedules (which is what I really want) because you'd only have to process 3 variables:

1. keep all snapshots from today and yesterday.
2. keep 1 snapshot per day for the previous [40] days.
3. keep 1 snapshot per week for the previous [6] weeks.
4. keep 1 snapshot per month for the previous [14] months.
5. keep 1 snapshot per year for all previous years.

(those are the settings I would use; your own defaults might look different)

Everybody's needs will vary slightly, depending on how frequently they take snapshots in the first place, and how much capacity they have for archives, and what kind of data is being backed up, etc.

But by using a count instead of a calendar, you could at least keep track of your available storage space, and if it is filling up too quickly you could check if your delete schedule is not aggressive enough - not that you need to try to hold on until January.

Thanks for considering.