I was poking around the S3 buckets that duplicati sends backups to, and was a little puzzled by the age of some of the files. On the backup job I have it set to use smart retention, so I was quite surprised to find dindex and dblock files going back 4 years. I checked the logs, and do see it reporting that retention rules are being processed, for example:
“2022-06-20 23:13:45 -07 - [Information-Duplicati.Library.Main.Operation.DeleteHandler:RetentionPolicy-StartCheck]: Start checking if backups can be removed”,
“2022-06-20 23:13:45 -07 - [Information-Duplicati.Library.Main.Operation.DeleteHandler:RetentionPolicy-FramesAndIntervals]: Time frames and intervals pairs: 7.00:00:00 / 1.00:00:00, 28.00:00:00 / 7.00:00:00, 365.00:00:00 / 31.00:00:00”,
“2022-06-20 23:13:45 -07 - [Information-Duplicati.Library.Main.Operation.DeleteHandler:RetentionPolicy-BackupList]: Backups to consider: 6/19/2022 11:00:00 PM, 6/18/2022 11:00:00 PM, 6/17/2022 11:00:00 PM, 6/16/2022 11:00:00 PM, 6/15/2022 11:00:00 PM, 6/14/2022 11:00:00 PM, 6/13/2022 11:00:00 PM, 6/7/2022 11:00:00 PM, 5/31/2022 11:00:00 PM, 5/24/2022 11:00:00 PM, 4/19/2022 11:00:00 PM, 3/15/2022 11:00:00 PM, 2/8/2022 10:00:00 PM, 1/4/2022 10:00:00 PM, 11/29/2021 10:00:00 PM, 10/24/2021 11:00:00 PM, 9/19/2021 11:00:00 PM, 8/15/2021 11:00:00 PM, 7/11/2021 11:00:00 PM”,
"2022-06-20 23:13:45 -07 - [Information-Duplicati.Library.Main.Operation.DeleteHandler:RetentionPolicy-BackupsToDelete]: Backups outside of all time frames and thus getting deleted: ",
“2022-06-20 23:13:45 -07 - [Information-Duplicati.Library.Main.Operation.DeleteHandler:RetentionPolicy-AllBackupsToDelete]: All backups to delete: 6/13/2022 11:00:00 PM”,
“2022-06-20 23:13:45 -07 - [Information-Duplicati.Library.Main.Operation.DeleteHandler-DeleteRemoteFileset]: Deleting 1 remote fileset(s) …”,
“2022-06-20 23:15:03 -07 - [Information-Duplicati.Library.Main.BasicResults-BackendEvent]: Backend event: Delete - Started: duplicati-20220614T060000Z.dlist.zip.aes (97.79 MB)”,
“2022-06-20 23:15:03 -07 - [Information-Duplicati.Library.Main.BasicResults-BackendEvent]: Backend event: Delete - Completed: duplicati-20220614T060000Z.dlist.zip.aes (97.79 MB)”,
“2022-06-20 23:15:04 -07 - [Information-Duplicati.Library.Main.Operation.DeleteHandler-DeleteResults]: Deleted 1 remote fileset(s)”,
However, the log looks like it’s only cleaning up the dlist files, not the dblock or dindex files. Is that intentional? Why would it not clean up the actual data files as well as the lists?
I’m assuming, because I don’t have the dlist files, I can safely delete anything outside of the smart retention (1 year)? Or I can choose to leave them and then I have 4 years of un-indexed backups, and can still restore from them using the restore option if it can read the dblock or dindex files. Is that correct?