Hi Romu, The general term for this is "Backup rotation scheme", if you want to see some approaches that other people use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backup_rotation_scheme
I don't recommend only keeping the last 3 days, for the reasons described on the "First in, first out" section on the above wikipedia page. The "Grandfather-father-son" scheme is much more common. You can't use the tarsnap binary itself to automatically remove archives that are more than x days old, but there's a number of third-party scripts which do this. Please see the "Archive management" section: https://www.tarsnap.com/helper-scripts.html Cheers, - Graham On Sun, Jun 27, 2021 at 10:26:07AM +1200, Romo Hu wrote: > Hi, > > My system has a daily cron job that does tarsnap backup which has been > running since 2017, and "tarsnap --list-archives" shows a lot of > archives. Should I care? Is it ok to just let the archive number keep > growing? If there will never be a need to restore data that are more > than 3 days old, can I just remove all archives that are more than 3 > days old? Is it possible to configure tarsnap to only keep archives of > the recent 3 days? > > Regards > Romu
