BORG-PRUNE(1) borg backup tool BORG-PRUNE(1)
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 com-
pact.
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 ar-
chives 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 lim-
its (--keep-X).
If a prefix is set with -P, then only archives that start with the pre-
fix 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 distinc-
tion 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 crite-
ria.
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 cre-
ate 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 inter-
esting 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. (depre-
cated)
-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 un-
less 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 any-
thing.
# 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-exam-
ple.txt.
SEE ALSO
borg-common(1), borg-compact(1)
AUTHOR
The Borg Collective
2023-03-22 BORG-PRUNE(1)
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