Backup retention

The Operator supports setting pgBackRest retention policies for full and differential backups. When a full backup expires according to the retention policy, pgBackRest cleans up all the files related to this backup and to the write-ahead log. Thus, the expiration of a full backup with some incremental backups based on it results in expiring of all these incremental backups.

You can control backup retention by the following pgBackRest options:

• --<repo name>-retention-full number of full backups to retain,
• --<repo name>-retention-diff number of differential backups to retain.

You can also specify retention type for full backups as <repo name>-retention-full-type, setting it to either count (the number of full backups to keep) or time (the number of days to keep a backup for).

You can set both backup type and retention policy for each of 4 repositories as follows.

backups:
    pgbackrest:
...
      global:
        repo1-retention-full: "14"
        repo1-retention-full-type: time
        ...

Differential retention can be set in a similar way:

backups:
    pgbackrest:
...
      global:
        repo1-retention-diff: "3"
        ...

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Last update: 2025-10-07