Retention

Snapshots accumulate. A retention policy says which ones to keep; the others are removed by restic forget, and their space freed by restic prune.

Rules

Turn on Remove old snapshots in the repository's settings and set any of:

Rule	Keeps
Last	The newest N snapshots
Hourly, Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Yearly	The newest snapshot of each of the last N hours, days, weeks, months, years
Keep everything newer than	Every snapshot younger than a duration, such as 30d or 1y6m

A snapshot kept by any rule is kept. The suggested policy keeps 7 daily, 4 weekly and 12 monthly snapshots: about a year of history, with fine detail for the last week.

Prune afterwards frees the space right away. Pruning reads and rewrites part of the repository, which takes time and, on cloud storage, can cost transfer; without it, schedule a prune now and then from More.

Preview

Preview runs restic forget --dry-run with the rules on the form, before they are saved, and lists which snapshots each rule keeps and which would be removed.

When it runs

The Apply the retention policy automatically schedule runs it, such as every Sunday at 04:00. It only applies to the snapshots ResticGUI made for this repository: snapshots made by restic on the command line, or by another host, are left alone.