Provided by: borgbackup_1.2.6-2_amd64 bug

NAME

       borg-prune - Prune repository archives according to specified rules

SYNOPSIS

       borg [common options] prune [options] [REPOSITORY]

DESCRIPTION

       The  prune  command  prunes  a repository by deleting all archives not matching any of the
       specified retention options.

       Important: Repository disk space is not freed until you run borg compact.

       This command is normally used by automated backup scripts wanting to keep a certain number
       of   historic   backups.   This   retention   policy   is  commonly  referred  to  as  GFS
       (Grandfather-father-son) backup rotation scheme.

       Also, prune automatically removes checkpoint archives (incomplete archives left behind  by
       interrupted  backup  runs)  except if the checkpoint is the latest archive (and thus still
       needed). Checkpoint archives are not considered when comparing archive counts against  the
       retention limits (--keep-X).

       If  a  prefix is set with -P, then only archives that start with the prefix are considered
       for deletion and only those archives count towards the  totals  specified  by  the  rules.
       Otherwise,  all  archives  in  the  repository  are  candidates for deletion!  There is no
       automatic distinction between archives representing different contents. These need  to  be
       distinguished by specifying matching prefixes.

       If  you have multiple sequences of archives with different data sets (e.g.  from different
       machines) in one shared repository, use one prune call per data set that matches only  the
       respective archives using the -P option.

       The  --keep-within  option takes an argument of the form "<int><char>", where char is "H",
       "d", "w", "m", "y". For example, --keep-within 2d means to keep  all  archives  that  were
       created  within  the  past  48 hours.  "1m" is taken to mean "31d". The archives kept with
       this option do not count towards the totals specified by any other options.

       A good procedure is to thin out more and more the older your backups get.  As an  example,
       --keep-daily  7 means to keep the latest backup on each day, up to 7 most recent days with
       backups (days without backups do not count).  The  rules  are  applied  from  secondly  to
       yearly,  and backups selected by previous rules do not count towards those of later rules.
       The time that each backup starts is  used  for  pruning  purposes.  Dates  and  times  are
       interpreted  in  the  local  timezone,  and  weeks  go from Monday to Sunday. Specifying a
       negative number of archives to keep means that there is no limit. As of borg  1.2.0,  borg
       will  retain  the  oldest archive if any of the secondly, minutely, hourly, daily, weekly,
       monthly, or yearly rules was not otherwise able to meet its retention target. This enables
       the  first chronological archive to continue aging until it is replaced by a newer archive
       that meets the retention criteria.

       The --keep-last N option is doing the same as --keep-secondly N (and it will keep the last
       N archives under the assumption that you do not create more than one backup archive in the
       same second).

       When using --stats, you will get some statistics about how much data  was  deleted  -  the
       "Deleted  data"  deduplicated  size  there  is  most  interesting as that is how much your
       repository will shrink.  Please note that the "All archives"  stats  refer  to  the  state
       after pruning.

OPTIONS

       See borg-common(1) for common options of Borg commands.

   arguments
       REPOSITORY
              repository to prune

   options
       -n, --dry-run
              do not change repository

       --force
              force  pruning  of corrupted archives, use --force --force in case --force does not
              work.

       -s, --stats
              print statistics for the deleted archive

       --list output verbose list of archives it keeps/prunes

       --keep-within INTERVAL
              keep all archives within this time interval

       --keep-last, --keep-secondly
              number of secondly archives to keep

       --keep-minutely
              number of minutely archives to keep

       -H, --keep-hourly
              number of hourly archives to keep

       -d, --keep-daily
              number of daily archives to keep

       -w, --keep-weekly
              number of weekly archives to keep

       -m, --keep-monthly
              number of monthly archives to keep

       -y, --keep-yearly
              number of yearly archives to keep

       --save-space
              work slower, but using less space

       -c SECONDS, --checkpoint-interval SECONDS
              write checkpoint every SECONDS seconds (Default: 1800)

   Archive filters
       -P PREFIX, --prefix PREFIX
              only consider archive names starting with this prefix. (deprecated)

       -a GLOB, --glob-archives GLOB
              only consider archive names matching the glob. sh:  rules  apply,  see  "borg  help
              patterns".

EXAMPLES

       Be careful, prune is a potentially dangerous command, it will remove backup archives.

       The default of prune is to apply to all archives in the repository unless you restrict its
       operation to a subset of the archives using --glob-archives.  When using  --glob-archives,
       be  careful  to choose a good matching pattern - e.g. do not use "foo*" if you do not also
       want to match "foobar".

       It is strongly recommended to always run prune -v --list --dry-run ...  first so you  will
       see what it would do without it actually doing anything.

          # Keep 7 end of day and 4 additional end of week archives.
          # Do a dry-run without actually deleting anything.
          $ borg prune -v --list --dry-run --keep-daily=7 --keep-weekly=4 /path/to/repo

          # Same as above but only apply to archive names starting with the hostname
          # of the machine followed by a "-" character:
          $ borg prune -v --list --keep-daily=7 --keep-weekly=4 --glob-archives='{hostname}-*' /path/to/repo
          # actually free disk space:
          $ borg compact /path/to/repo

          # Keep 7 end of day, 4 additional end of week archives,
          # and an end of month archive for every month:
          $ borg prune -v --list --keep-daily=7 --keep-weekly=4 --keep-monthly=-1 /path/to/repo

          # Keep all backups in the last 10 days, 4 additional end of week archives,
          # and an end of month archive for every month:
          $ borg prune -v --list --keep-within=10d --keep-weekly=4 --keep-monthly=-1 /path/to/repo

       There is also a visualized prune example in docs/misc/prune-example.txt.

SEE ALSO

       borg-common(1), borg-compact(1)

AUTHOR

       The Borg Collective

                                            2023-08-30                              BORG-PRUNE(1)