Control how long Rsnapshot keeps a file after being deleted

Question

I have an Rsnapshotting local server that takes snapshots of folders of miscellaneous computers within the local LAN.

There are daily, weekly, monthly and yearly snapshots.

So somebody puts a file into one of those folders being monitored by Rsnapshot and then some hours later the Rsnapshot server takes his daily snapshot.

After that the user deletes this given file.

And then the next day the system takes another snapshot.

It seems like this file will get permanently deleted on the backup, seven days (for I have 7 dailies) after the last snapshot was taken of it.

Are there any precautions for controlling how long a system keeps files that are being deleted, in Rsnapshot?

How have others dealt with this issue?

Answer 1

Rsnapshot takes a snapshot every day and every seven days the oldest daily snapshot becomes the new weekly snapshot. The other dailies are discarded. That's the basic idea, to store a relatively low number of snapshots, but with high granularity for the recent days and decreasing granularity for older data.

If I understand you correctly, you want to keep the state of every day without discarding any data. Then the solution is not to use yearlies, monthlies and weeklies, but to use e.g.

retain daily 730

this stores the backup for two years without discarding any data not older than 730 days.