Maximum backup versions?

Support
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Chiming in here, since this is my code (and my spelling mistakes *cough*):

Is there any further instruction for how to use this

Sadly not. I thought keeping the description somewhat brief might be good, as I was afraid it might scare of users when they see a huge wall of text ^^
I tried to explain the feature and how it works in a comment in the corresponding ticket Issue 2084 (comment)

I think the most important information are:

  • the letters for seconds, minutes, hours, etc are the same as in the keep-time option. So from smallest to biggest: ‘s’, ‘m’, ‘h’, ‘D’, ‘W’, ‘M’, ‘Y’
  • As explained in the example in the option description: The interval of 0 (no matter if seconds, minutes, etc) basicly means “keep all versions in that time frame” since the distance between two backups will always be bigger than that, thus never deleting anything
  • The time frames do not stack but rather overlap, with the smaller time frames taking priority:
    So if you configured 1 week with keeping all backups and 2 weeks with keeping only daily backups, then it will effectivly result in all backups being kept for the first week (as configured) and after that 1 (sic!) week with daily backups (2 weeks minus the one overlap)
  • As kenkendk also metioned in his review of my pull request: The option might cause some confusing in regards to the already existing keep-time option.
    The way I built it, this feature will never touch any backups that are older than what you configured. So if your biggest time frame spans 2 years, then everything after that will be ignored. If you ultimately want to remove all backups older than a certain age, you ALSO have to add the keep-time option.
    I’d say it’s still open to debate what makes the most sense here.

what the acceptable parameters are, how many are allowed (unlimited? just 3? unsure)

There is no specific limit to the amount of parameters. I’m using it with 4 time frames: 7D:0s,1M:1D,6M:1W,10Y:1M plus the keep-time option with 10Y

hopefully some GUI can be built around it soon but text-based is ok with me for now as long as I understand what I can and can’t do with it

Yeah that’d be nice indeed. There were some people already asking if they can help building the GUI for it, since I have no experience with that in C# yet.
I’ll update the ticket with the information that this feature made it into Duplicati, so others might be encouraged to work on it

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