Prune Directives

Prune directives are used to indicate criteria for when versions should be discarded for a specified file name pattern, in order to conserve disk space. This pattern will apply to files in the current folder being versioned or any subfolder. If no wildcard pattern is furnished for a prune directive, it will apply to any file in the folder being versioned.

Warning

Note that prune directives are presently only enforced for versions retained on a hard disk and will have no effect on a git repository (since git repos often have lots of storage whereas hard disk space can be limited; also, scripts can be written for git repos to manage that…) To err on the side of caution, in the current release of repliversion all versions in a git repo are retained by default.

To avoid making redundant directives for both a folder and global ones, when you edit a folder’s directives, global directives are shaded in orange. As a footnote will indicate, you cannot edit these ones when your are editing a folder’s directives; but you can add and edit ones specific to the folder, as you see fit. This is a global directive only allowing a maximum of twelve files to be retained (and these will be the twelve most recent ones…)

_images/prune_folder.png

The following are a summary of criteria that can be used to prune files being versioned:

  • max versions: The maximum number of versions that can exist for any specified file; only the most recent versions will be retained.

  • max age: The maximum age that a specified backup file can have. The age can be expressed as hours, days, weeks, months (averaging 30.4 days to the month…), or years. So to specify that no backup versions are to be retained after 2 weeks, one can specify a max age of “2 weeks”.

  • max size: The maximum size that a specified collection of backup files for a single file can have. The size can be specified with a suffix of “kb” for kilobytes, “mb” for megabytes, or “gb” for gigabytes. So to specify that the backup files for any file being versioned are not to exceed 10 megabytes of disk storage, one would specify “10mb”.

  • frequency: This is a slightly more complex directive that allows you to specify a series of time windows (or a single one…) for which backup versions are to be retained for any single file. It uses the time window values “daily”, “weekly”, “monthly”, “quarterly”, and “annually”. Versions will be retained for the latest time window specified. So if you specify a frequency of “weekly”, the latest version in each fixed calendar week, if one exists, will be retained. You can combine time windows using a comma list, and the latest versions will be retained in the order of maximum granularity. Example: if you specify a frequency of “weekly, monthly”, the latest version of each file in a calendar week will be kept, up until a month ago; then before that, one file will be kept for each calendar month for the latest day in each month (if available…) This way the granularity of versions retained going further back in time will be less frequent, affording an ability to free up space used by rather old versions.