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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. This command is normally used  by  automated  backup  scripts
       wanting to keep a certain number of historic backups.

       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.

       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

   optional arguments
       -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

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

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

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 --prefix.  When using --prefix, be careful to
       choose a good prefix - e.g. do not use a prefix "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 --prefix='{hostname}-' /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)

AUTHOR

       The Borg Collective

                                            2020-12-24                              BORG-PRUNE(1)