I’ve just started using Duplicati and I have a question about the retention options that are available in the GUI. Initially I set the retention policy to “keep 4 versions”, assuming this meant that Duplicati would store up to 4 versions of every file I made a backup of. However, having used Duplicati for a little while now, I get the impression that every time I run a backup a new “version” is created, which would mean that if I run a backup every day I can only go back to the version of a file that existed 4 days ago, even if that is exactly the same version of the file as today. I’ve searched the user manual & this forum to find out which interpretation of “version” is correct, but haven’t been able to find a definitive answer. Who can help me out?
Welcome to the forum @oratonastick
A backup version is a point-in-time view of all files. You can sort of see this from the home page status:
means I have 25 historical views, and they should typically all be available to use with Restore selector.
If you want to save files longer, you can save whole backups (sets of files) longer. Deduplication keeps additional space from being used, if the file is unchanged. New backups just point to previous contents.