# Staggered versioning / thinning out versions

**URL:** <https://forum.duplicati.com/t/staggered-versioning-thinning-out-versions/419>\
**Category:** Features\
**Created:** [September 3, 2017, 11:17am UTC](https://forum.duplicati.com/t/staggered-versioning-thinning-out-versions/419 "2017-09-03T11:17:53Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 1

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**Author:** ![Tekki](https://forum.duplicati.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/da6949/32.png) [@Tekki](https://forum.duplicati.com/u/Tekki)\
**Post date:** [September 3, 2017, 11:17am UTC](https://forum.duplicati.com/t/staggered-versioning-thinning-out-versions/419/1 "2017-09-03T11:17:53Z")

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Hi all,

being yet another victim of Crashplans discontinuation of their home plans, I stumbled upon this lovely piece of software and so far I really like it.

One feature I seem to miss though is staggered versioning or version thinning, as for example ArqBackup calls it. That is, I would like Duplicati to keep hourly backups for a day or so, then daily backups for the current month, weekly for a year and so on. You get the idea 🙂

While I know that Duplicati only saves blocks that differ from a previous backup, the size of my backup location grows by about 500MB with each run, since there are so many files changing. So far this results in about 20GB per week, depending on how long my PC is turned on. With my backup source only being 45GB, I will soon have 10x as much backup data as my original data.

As far as I see my options currently are only:

- Keeping fewer version (–keep-versions, --keep-time), resulting in maybe not being able to recover a file that got corrupted much earlier without noticing it
- Reducing how frequent the backup is run resulting in potentially losing the work of several hours on that day in case of a hardware failure

So I hope to keep the growth of my backup down to a somewhat managable level without any of these problems by using staggered versioning.

Being a Java Developer I feel intrigued to try to finally get into C# and to try to add this feature myself. Though before doing so, I wonder if this feature is also something that the devs would consider adopting into the public builds. That probably determines how much time I also have to spend with getting into the whole Github workflow and on integrating that feature into the advanced options or even into the GUI. ^^

Tekki

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