How long backups are kept, and storage

What’s kept

Backups in WP Foreman storage go back at least 90 days:

• The latest 10 backups are always kept.
• For the last 48 hours, one backup per hour is kept.
• Before that, one backup per day is kept for the 90 most recent days that had a backup. For a site backed up every day, that’s 90 days. For a site backed up once a week, it’s about 90 weeks.

Older backups are removed automatically after each backup. They stay in the list marked Expired so you can still see what ran, but they can’t be browsed, downloaded or restored.

Why it doesn’t take much space

Every backup is incremental. Files and database data that are already stored aren’t stored again, and everything is compressed. A site’s storage usually ends up around one to one and a half times its live size, even with months of daily backups and the extra backups taken before updates.

Sites whose database changes a lot every day (busy stores, log or session tables) grow faster. Leave tables like logs out in what gets backed up to keep them small.

See how much you use

• Backups page for a site: Backup storage shows what all of that site’s backups take up, and the total for all your sites.
• Each backup’s Added to storage shows how much new data it stored.
• The bottom of the Dashboard shows your total backup storage.

Space from expired backups is freed by a daily cleanup, so the number can take a day or two to drop after backups expire.