Retention policy

[stormbyte]

I have A question about the Retention policy

It's currently setup like this:

I expected with the following settigs:

• Keep daily: 7
• Keep weekly: 2
• Keep monthly: 1
• Keep yearly: 1

That there would be at max 11 backups, but it seems the 7 daily are purging the weekly, monthly and yearly.

Is this expected behavior, or am I misunderstanding the intention?

[nicotsx]

@stormbyte these parameters are sent to the restic forget command directly. You can read more here

Let's say we are the 31st January 2026, you started backing up daily the 1st. Your retention applies:

• Keep daily 7, will keep your last 7 snapshtos
• Keep weekly 2 will keep the last 2 sundays snapshots (the last one was included in your daily)
• Keep monthly 1 will keep the most recent backup of the last month (Equivalent to your last daily snapshot)
• Keep yearly 1 will keep the most recent backup of the year. This is also equivalent to your last daily snapshot

So in total you'll have 8 snapshots for this month since you have a lot of overlap

Putting a value of 1 in your case is not really useful. It means for the last 1 month or for the last 1 year. Keep the most recent snapshot. So you'll get:

• The most recent snapshot of the month
• The most recent snapshot of the year

Which both are already covered by your daily policy

[stormbyte]

I have updated the schedule to
Keep daily: 6
Keep weekly: 2
Keep monthly: 2
Keep yearly: 2
As i interpreted the explanation and documentation.

Trying to view the results and keeping it running waiting.

With these settings there are 7 snapshots, happy that the yearly seems to be kept.

[stormbyte]

The new layout makes it very clear how the labels are designated.

I would never have guessed that today and yesterday where counting as weekly as they are not even 7 days apart.

The updated schedule is now
Keep daily: 6
Keep weekly: 3
Keep monthly: 2
Keep yearly: 2

Resulting in 9 backups

Thank you for the beautiful update 🥇