[Box Backup] Deleting old snapshots

[Per Thomsen]

On 3/29/05 11:48 AM, Richard Wallace wrote:

> Hey guys,
>
> Been using Box Backup in snapshot mode for a while now and I'm pretty 
> happy with it.  Our backups are getting a little large and we really 
> only want to keep the data from the last 45 days.  Is there a way to 
> remove snapshots older than a certain time?

Rich,
Snapshots are not really snapshots in the traditional sense of the word, 
when you use Box. A snapshot just means that you decided to sync your 
disk to the backup store at a given time. So, you don't really have a 
physical set of files that are snapshotted, but rather a set of initial 
files, and patches applied to those files reflecting the changes between 
snapshots (it's a little more complicated than that, but that's the 
basic gist of it).

The way that Box works, the best way (IMHO) is to figure out the size of 
the backup set that you want, and then adjust your storage allocation to 
match that.

So, if you find that 45 days of backups takes up ~30GB of data, I would 
issue the following command:

bbstoreaccounts setlimit XXXXX 30G 31G

to set your limit to 30G with a 1G buffer.

I can see the benefit of supporting 'x days old' as a way to decide what 
gets deleted from the store. It might have to be done in conjunction 
with some storage size, to avoid running out of disk space.

Thanks,
Per

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Per Reedtz Thomsen | Reedtz Consulting, LLC | F: 209 883 4119
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