Hi good people. I’m confused about smart retention, which has only kept 1 backup, but I expected a lot more.
My new nightly backup is 4 days old, and has run 5 times total:
Mar 29, 2026, 4:01:04 AM took 1m
Mar 28, 2026, 8:12:23 AM took 1m
Mar 28, 2026, 4:00:41 AM took 1m
Mar 27, 2026, 4:01:07 AM took 1m
Mar 26, 2026, 4:14:17 PM took 8h
One of those was when I initially created the backup, three were the daily schedule at 4am, and one more was by me looking at the backup settings and hitting ‘next’ enough times that it ran a extra backup right then. I believe that my retention was originally “keep all backups’“ and that this was the occasion I switched to “smart backup retention”.
I only have one backup that is kept - my home page has a green “1 version” bubble on this backup. And if I try restoring the backup, then the only snapshot I’m offered to select is “0: Mar 26, 7:42:41AM”, which corresponds to 8h before the first backup.
I understand that retention set to 1W:1D might delete one of the backups on two consecutive days, because backups might be slightly less than 24 hours apart. But I can’t understand how that could explain deleting each new backup day after day for four days.
I have no indication that any of the backups failed - they have a green circle by the date in the backup’s logs page.
I’m only assuming that retention is to blame here. I’ve yet to find logs that verify each backup is being deleted by retention right after it is created. I guess I’ll go see if I can do that next…
I’ve been hesitant to post this, because I’m probably just misunderstanding and need to read the docs again…
I’m on a new install of 2.2.0.3_stable_2026-01-06, running as an image on ZimaOS, on my Zimablade hardware, source files from two RAID1 HDD via SATA, and backup destination to a HDD via USB.
I’m overhauling my whole NAS and backups, so am getting re-familiar with Duplicati. It’s really nice to see how the project has improved since last time I was diving into the UI and documentation, etc.