What is forget's "compact format"?

Getting Help
1

The man page for forget says:

       -c, --compact[=false]
           use compact format

restic.readthedocs.io has nothing about this.

What is this format? When would I want to use or avoid it?

2

This is for a more compact list of snapshots that will be removed when using the policy-based options (--keep-daily, etc.). Run a policy-based forget with --dry-run and compare the output with and without -c.

1 Like
3

Thanks to @cdhowie’s --dry-run idea, I saw with -c:

C:\Users\Jnani\Documents>restic forget --dry-run --keep-daily 1 --host svelte -c
repository 86b7fabe opened successfully, password is correct
Applying Policy: keep the last 1 daily snapshots
keep 1 snapshots:
ID        Time                 Host    Tags
---------------------------------------------
2cc9969a  2019-08-01 14:55:54  svelte  seed
---------------------------------------------
1 snapshots

keep 1 snapshots:
ID        Time                 Host    Tags
---------------------------------------------
32a7dbc8  2019-08-01 13:03:18  svelte  seed
---------------------------------------------
1 snapshots

keep 1 snapshots:
ID        Time                 Host    Tags
---------------------------------------------
5e95e60c  2019-08-01 12:05:40  svelte  seed
---------------------------------------------
1 snapshots

So the “Reasons” and “Paths” columns are missing.