Retention improvement

[arman712]

why is the retention mechanism not more flexible, for example, to allow setting a parameter in days, hours, and minutes? I had a situation where I needed to make a backup every hour and store only the last two archives, but I could not achieve this with the existing mechanisms

[m90]

I'm happy to discuss any improvement to this area that is not breaking the existing configuration setup. Please also note that it'd accelerate things a lot if this was implemented by the community itself.

[m90]

This could probably work like this:

• Deprecate BACKUP_RETENTION_DAYS, but keep it working as is
• Introduce BACKUP_RETENTION_PERIOD which takes precedence if given. It can receive a duration string that can be parsed by Go's time.ParseDuration: https://pkg.go.dev/time#ParseDuration

Downside of this approach would be that a "natural" retention like 7 days can get a bit unwieldy as it turns into 168h

[arman712]

what if you enter BACKUP_RETENTION_COPIES , which will take an integer value, and if this parameter is set then ignore BACKUP_RETENTION_DAYS, this will make management more flexible, I can always store as many BACKUPs as I need

[m90]

Is there a use case that could be covered by BACKUP_RETENTION_COPIES that is not possible to cover using a more flexible BACKUP_RETENTION_PERIOD?