How to safely clean up old dump files for freeing space?

[bzon]

I have run dragonfly with --save_schedule:*:10 (every 10 minutes). I noticed that it keeps a lot of snapshots by default. Is it safe to delete these files? If I will create a clean up script, should I just keep the latest snapshots (by timestamp)? Is

-rw-r--r-- 1 root 1001 323M Jul 18 15:10 dump-2023-07-18T15:10:17-0000.dfs
-rw-r--r-- 1 root 1001 322M Jul 18 15:10 dump-2023-07-18T15:10:17-0003.dfs
-rw-r--r-- 1 root 1001 322M Jul 18 15:10 dump-2023-07-18T15:10:17-0002.dfs
-rw-r--r-- 1 root 1001 322M Jul 18 15:10 dump-2023-07-18T15:10:17-0006.dfs
-rw-r--r-- 1 root 1001 322M Jul 18 15:10 dump-2023-07-18T15:10:17-0004.dfs
-rw-r--r-- 1 root 1001 322M Jul 18 15:10 dump-2023-07-18T15:10:17-0001.dfs
-rw-r--r-- 1 root 1001 322M Jul 18 15:10 dump-2023-07-18T15:10:17-0005.dfs
-rw-r--r-- 1 root 1001 4.0K Jul 18 15:10 dump-2023-07-18T15:10:17-summary.dfs
-rw-r--r-- 1 root 1001 336M Jul 18 16:10 dump-2023-07-18T16:10:04-0000.dfs
-rw-r--r-- 1 root 1001 335M Jul 18 16:10 dump-2023-07-18T16:10:04-0005.dfs
-rw-r--r-- 1 root 1001 335M Jul 18 16:10 dump-2023-07-18T16:10:04-0002.dfs
-rw-r--r-- 1 root 1001 335M Jul 18 16:10 dump-2023-07-18T16:10:04-0006.dfs
-rw-r--r-- 1 root 1001 335M Jul 18 16:10 dump-2023-07-18T16:10:04-0004.dfs
-rw-r--r-- 1 root 1001 335M Jul 18 16:10 dump-2023-07-18T16:10:04-0001.dfs
-rw-r--r-- 1 root 1001 4.0K Jul 18 16:10 dump-2023-07-18T16:10:04-summary.dfs
-rw-r--r-- 1 root 1001 335M Jul 18 16:10 dump-2023-07-18T16:10:04-0003.dfs

[romange]

hi @bzon . As explained by https://www.dragonflydb.io/docs/managing-dragonfly/backups our default mode is using dump-{timestamp} filenames. However, if you want you can override the flag and just use dump which will override the same snapshot again and again.

[bzon]

If I change the flag value for dbfilename now of a running dragonfly, I need to restart it right? Will it use the old dump files? I'm worried that it will restart and will not restore the old snapshot and lose data.

[romange]

i can confirm it will still load the data from the latest snapshot.

[admtech]

The idea of {timestamp} is good in itself, but it would be nice if you could refine it a bit. For example, I would like to save the database for each day, so rather the value {date} or even finer {Y}-{m}-{d} (so that you can set it e.g. only daily, monthly or yearly). With {timestamp} the system fills up very fast if you use the "save" function often or if you time it. But if you only have the current date, you would always have a backup of the previous days etc. automatically. The rest, i.e. the cleanup, can be done by a shell script (delete everything older than x days etc.).

I have opened a feature issue for this:
#1637

greetings
Frank