Different Backup Retention Per Site?

JKSoftware

Hi all,

I’ve configured Enhance to take backups every 12 hours and retain them for 1 month. However, this seems to have put a lot of pressure on my Btrfs filesystem, likely due to the large number of snapshots.

Is it possible to override the global backup retention policy per site? For example, I’d like some smaller or less critical sites to have a much simpler setup — e.g. 1 backup per day, keeping only the last 5 backups.

Is that supported, or planned?

Thanks in advance!

xyzulu

JKSoftware this seems to have put a lot of pressure on my Btrfs filesystem

This is why so many of us have switched to ext4. Are you running Enhance v12.x?

Edit: I checked your past posts.. you are on v12.. so why not consider switching to ext4 for your backup storage mount?

Shaijee

JKSoftware Is it possible to override the global backup retention policy per site? For example, I’d like some smaller or less critical sites to have a much simpler setup — e.g. 1 backup per day, keeping only the last 5 backups.

It's a very important feature and has been logged, but there's no hope since it's not listed on the roadmap. The team is also slow. Moreover, some people will come and say, "All is well."

prasad0889

It is already mentioned here: https://community.enhance.com/d/8-more-backup-settings-for-each-hosting-package-individually-determined-logged

JKSoftware

xyzulu Hello!

Just a quick note before switching filesystems, we're not entirely sure that the new setup (e.g. Ext4) will offer the same storage efficiency as the previous one (Btrfs).

This is because Btrfs supports native snapshots with copy-on-write, meaning that even with multiple backups, unchanged files didn't occupy additional space. Only the differences between snapshots consumed extra disk space.

With Ext4, unless we implement deduplication or use hard-linked rsync backups, each snapshot or backup folder could result in fully duplicated data, leading to significantly higher disk usage.

It might be worth doing a few test backups on Ext4 and comparing space usage before committing to a full migration — just to avoid any unexpected storage overhead.

cPFence

JKSoftware

The new system is fully incremental, we actually saw around 10% lower disk usage after switching. Check out this guide for how to make the switch.

xyzulu

JKSoftware see some personal observations here: https://community.enhance.com/d/2588-backups-using-more-space-after-v12/8

There is a reason why Enhance stopped requiring BTRFS.. it has limitations that some of us have hit and observed in real time.