Only backup files newer than X days

[texwood]

@drwtsn32

@AndrewHMcDonald

I could reset all the archive bits when I do the physical backup and then tell Duplicati to only backup the files with the archive bit set, which should only be files modified since the last full physical backup.

That sounds like a great solution.

In the future, if enough people request native support in Duplicati for backing up files based on modification date, I think it could be added pretty easily.

@AndrewHMcDonald

I definitely need to do some experimenting to fully understand how the retention works since I didn’t get it. Any helpful articles?

I would definitely like to see this option.

The way archive bit works is this: when a file has been created or modified in Windows, the archive bit is flipped on (“File is ready for archiving”).

Maybe I’m old school… when I was an enterprise server admin years ago, I was setting up backup jobs for ARCServe and Backup Exec to run. So the way I setup the backup job to run is this:

• Weekly full backup - backup all files regardless of Archive bit status, and flip all the Archive bits of all files to off as AS or BE backed up each file
• Daily differential backup - backup all files that have Archive bit set on, but don’t flip the Archive bits to off

That way, each week I have a full backup + a differential backup of the changes since the last full backup every other day. If I ever need to restore the server files, I would restore the last full backup + the latest differential backup.

If you flip the Archive bit to off for the Daily backup, you’ll create an incremental backup. It will work too, but in case of full server restore, you will need to do a full backup, plus all the incremental backups for each day since the last backup - which will take longer to restore all the files.

So that’s how I leverage the archive bit for backup.