[Feature] Maximum Backup Folder Size

[tankdriver]

It would be nice to have a setting where you can set the maximum allowed backup space on the Backup target.

For example, I would like that the storage usage of the backup does not exceed 200 Gigabytes.

Reasons for this feature:
for example: Backup target is a storage device on the network AND...
.>.>. the target filesystem is not only used for backups, (photos, videos, shared folder with dynamical size)
[Without Feature] deja-dup will backup till no space is left. > adding additional data to shared folder is not possible unitl manual backup removal.
[With Feature] deja-dup will backup till "Maximum Backup Folder Size" is reached (and then delete old backups) > shared folder is still useable (if there is enough free space on filesystem anyway...)
.>.>. the target filesystem is used for backups under certain conditions, like
-- SSH (free space can not be reported > bad deja-dup error when run out of space)
-- NFS with quota (free space on quota can not be reported > error...)
[With Feature] you can set "Maximum Backup Size" smaller than "Filesystem(/Quota) Size" > no errors

~ % lsb_release -d
Description: Ubuntu 11.04

~ % dpkg-query -W deja-dup duplicity
deja-dup 18.1.1-0ubuntu1.1
duplicity 0.6.15-0ubuntu0ppa5~natty1

[Oldarney Maslata (oldarney)]

I have a similar issue... My host only supports 1340 files per folder... when deja forces me to use 10mb per file.. which limits the amount of back ups I can do.

[lale (lalelale)]

Yes please, this is a big problem for me as well.
I have a shared NAS in the office with other collegues. deja-dup fills the disk with my backups, which I don't want.
This also applies for local backups on a folder in another partition, if such partition is also used for other tasks.

The UI would be very unobtrusive: in the "Schedule" tab one could add a simple entry by default like this:

(o) Use all the available disk space for the backup folder.
( ) Use up to [50] GB for the backup folder

The text on the bottom could update dynamically depending on the choice, i.e. when the bottom is selected:
Old backups will be kept for at least a month or until the backup folder exceeds 50GB of disk space.

[Chris Martin (chris-martin-cc)]

Yes. This also effects me. I need to be able to limit the space consumed in the remote backup location
Setting a limit in the application seems like a logical step.

[Emma Reisz (emma-reisz)]

Urgently needed - many users cannot set up disk quotas, or are not permitted to do so (e.g. shared office NAS in a small business with no IT).

[Miłosz Kosobucki (mikom)]

Or Ubuntu One, I wouldn't like my backups to eat whole ubuntu one quota

[Felix Griewald (tiiunder)]

One year and still no change?

[Adrian Wilkins (adrian-wilkins)]

I would have thought this was an excellent idea in these days of cloud storage ; there's no point filling the disk with backups if the cloud quota has been overfilled...

[ML (0cs935kb517wwmwa7m9428daadkye-m9u2-wz6bkyhu4uqpfausw0ege9b0y33eg)]

some updates to this?

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

One thing that has prevented this historically is that the different storage backends offered made it sifficult to query the size of the backup folder (not built into duplicity directly, so deja-dup would have to duplicate some backend knowledge).

But now that I'm trying to move toward only backends supported by GVFS, this becomes more reasonable to support.