Add short-term and long-term retention settings

One feature that would be nice is a way to automatically keep some backups for longer term, like a scheduled archival backup. I mean being able to back up the database nightly and keep x backups, and also back up the database weekly/monthly and keep y backups. We can manually create archival backups that don’t get deleted. What if we could also do it on a schedule?

The goal is to be covered in the short term but also in the long term. For example, you’ve been afk for months and come back to find major problems and need to roll wayyyyy back. Or there was a feature or post that got inadvertently deleted or borked some months ago and you want to dig into a backup from then to see if you can dig it out or see what had happened.

Example:

Back up every 6 hours and keep 28, and
Back up every week and keep 4, and
Back up archival copy every month and keep 12.

I can’t tell from the wording of “For backups older than…” whether this offers something similar. But even if it allows you to keep say one from each week older than a week, you have to keep a zillion backups to get there. For the most active sites, that could mean a LOT of space is needed.

I’ve seen this in some hosting systems over the years. This kind of backup logic configuration would be extremely helpful and comforting.

PS I had to draft this post in a desktop app because the webform textarea field is displaying white-on-white.

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3 Comments

  1. lauras

    As I said, the wording of that feature isn’t clear. Let me illustrate an example, and perhaps that will clarify?

    Let’s say I have been taking nightly backups and I configure the following:

    For backups older than 2 weeks, keep no more than 2 backups every 1 week.

    Does this mean:

    A) Every week, all backups older than 2 weeks are deleted except for the 2 most recent ones? (So as of today, January 24, I would have backups for January 10-23 plus January 9 and January 8, and everything else older than 2 weeks is deleted.)

    or

    B) As backups get more than two weeks old, UpdraftPlus keeps 2 backups out of every 7? (So on January 24, I have January 10-23 plus January 2-3, December 26-27, December 19-20, etc.)

    Or is it something else?

    Thanks.

    Laura

  2. udadmin

    Hi Laura,

    It’s b); of *every* 7-day period going back, no more than 2 backups dated to that period will be retained. If it was a), then the words “every 1 week” in the description would have no meaning.

    David

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