Please help explain this "forget" result?

Getting Help
1

Restic version output

restic 0.19.1 compiled with go1.26.5 on darwin/arm64

Hello, this is my first post here. I started using restic two weeks ago to back up my Mac Studio. It works great, but could someone please explain to me this output from a “forget” command?

Here is the command…I use the 1Password CLI to inject passwords and other secrets into the environment, so those are not shown.

        op run --env-file=restic-b2.env -- restic forget \
            --compact \
            --tag 'plan:dr' \
            --keep-daily 5 \
            --prune

Here is the output:

Applying Policy: keep 5 daily snapshots
keep 2 snapshots:
ID        Time                 Host                     Tags     Size
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
07194c70  2026-07-20 07:07:02  Kilimanjaro.localdomain  plan:dr  425.166 GiB
f19f8759  2026-07-21 07:07:01  Kilimanjaro.localdomain  plan:dr  425.170 GiB
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Timestamps shown in local time
2 snapshots

keep 5 snapshots:
ID        Time                 Host                     Tags     Size
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
4f93626d  2026-07-16 18:15:30  Kilimanjaro.localdomain  plan:dr  425.105 GiB
7d7c8d7a  2026-07-16 19:36:53  Kilimanjaro.localdomain  plan:dr  425.105 GiB
d72d7c78  2026-07-17 13:37:32  Kilimanjaro.localdomain  plan:dr  425.106 GiB
e827ec73  2026-07-18 07:07:01  Kilimanjaro.localdomain  plan:dr  425.107 GiB
b3f70ed5  2026-07-19 07:07:02  Kilimanjaro.localdomain  plan:dr  425.108 GiB
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Timestamps shown in local time
5 snapshots

Why is the algorithm grouping the most recent two snapshots separately from the other 5? There is no explanation if I run the command without “–compact”. It just says “daily snapshot” in the reason column of those two snapshots.

This isn’t a complaint. The app does a great job of backing up. I’m only trying to understand how the retention policy “–keep-daily 5” runs in this instance.

Thank you so much.

2

The default grouping is by host and path. restic forget --help says:

-g, --group-by group group snapshots by host, paths and/or tags, separated by comma (disable grouping with ‘’) (default host,paths)

The two groups have the same host, so they probably do backup different sets of paths. If you don’t care about which paths are backed up, you can --group-by host, only, or by --group-by host,tag.

3

Thank you! That was exactly it. I began backing up my macOS keychains on the 20th, so the paths were different beginning then.