Infinite retention for deleted files

[cdhowie]

@Dj0k3

What I mean is that, with restic you can actually delete a snapshot that may have a unique file in it and lost it forever. In an incremental solution like duplicity even tho you can delete a backup older than X time, incremental backups depends on a full backup, so is harder to lose data when there are dependencies.

Basically, “if you can’t delete anything then nothing can be deleted.” If you delete one thing, you lose everything – this makes you hesitant to delete anything. I’m not sure I would call that an advantage. If that’s what you want, then just don’t ever remove any snapshots. You can even enforce this by only interacting with the repository over a REST server in append-only mode.

@Dj0k3

As for this Idea, the only thing that would worries me (because of space) is that if I delete a snapshot because I want to delete an unneeded file stored in it and this file is only present in this snapshot, then deleting the snapshot is worthless because, assuming that restic decides to keep “deleted data”, then it will actually not delete the file that I wanted to delete.

I’d assume the feature would be entirely optional. You’d either have to specifically configure the repository to enable this feature, or pass some flag to restic forget to opt-in.