Extended options for keeping backups

[TheKobe23]

I currently only see the option to set days to keep backups. In my opinion, it would be useful to also be able to set the minimum number of backups to be kept.

Let's assume I have set 30 days for the backups to be retained. Now (for whatever reason) the backup process does not work, but the deletion continues. If I do not react within the 30 days, I would lose all backups.

If it were possible to set that e.g. at least the last 10 backups are kept, no matter how old they are, my conscience would be extremely soothed, as these backups would be kept in any case.

At the moment I have solved this deletion procedure on my NAS with a script.

That feature would be pretty helpful, don't you think?

[jcwillox]

An interesting idea for sure, I'm not sure how it'd be implemented though how do I track X number of backups, is it for all backups on the system, because that'd be easy. Or is it only X of a specific kind, in which case how do I know two backups are the same kind, we humans can put "Daily" or "Monthly" in the title but that wouldn't be robust enough. Perhaps some sort of user defined key could work, keep 3 of all backups with the "daily" tag.

[jcwillox]

Alternatively you could keep using keep days and send a notification when a backup fails, Auto Backup emits an event on failure and you can use an automation to send a notification, there's a blueprint for that https://jcwillox.github.io/hass-auto-backup/events/#example-automation-using-events

[TheKobe23]

I've done it with a simple shell script:

#!/bin/bash
FOLDER="/share/..."
if [[ ! -d "$FOLDER" ]]; then
exit 1
fi
cd "$FOLDER" || exit
file_counter=$(ls -1 | wc -l)
if (( file_counter > 50 )); then
# Sort files acc. change date and delete all files from the 51st file
ls -t | tail -n +51 | while IFS= read -r datei; do
rm -f -- "$datei"
done
fi

But of course I didn't think about the details. I actually only ever use the full backup and make automatic backups every day. Individual backups are added from time to time. In the end, of course, I make no distinction between full backups and other types. Perhaps you could create a separate subfolder for each backup type. I don't know if it's that easy (permissions on the destination folder). And then you would probably have to be able to configure how many backups you want to keep for each backup type.

I haven't given it any technical thought. I just wanted to put it forward as an idea. :)