Save for all levels at first run.

[xkszltl]

Checklist

• I'm asking for a feature to be changed or added
• I've searched the bugtracker for similar issues, including closed ones.
• I realise that rsnapshot is stable software and most feature requests will be rejected

My suggestion is ...

If alpha.0 exists but beta.0 does not, create beta.0 from alpha.0 immediately, instead of waiting for alpha.last_retain.

Why I want it

Currently rsnapshot saves in an "overflowing" manner, e.g. first daily backup won't exist until 24 hourly backup.
The problem with that design is, daily backup will never cover things in the first day, and similarly weekly backup never knows about the first week.
IMO the backup windows should be consistent across levels.

From another perspective, if we initially setup hourly+daily, and later on remove hourly, there're 2 issues with current design:

• If it's done within the first day, it'll re-copy everything again because there's no daily.0 yet.
• If external tool wants to search something on daily level, it won't be able to do that until the 2nd day.

Why should this be in rsnapshot and not implemented using some external tool?

This behavior is purely controlled by rsnapshot.

[DrHyde]

You could, if you have GNU cp, sudo cp -al alpha.0 beta.0 after the first backup finishes.

[xkszltl]

I'm relying on similar workaround currently, but that requires parsing /etc/rsnapshot.conf to get all levels, and also depends on how exactly rsnapshot is implemented, which is why it's supposed to be done in rsnapshot.

This also couples with the destructive rotation issue: if we want to rotate earlier before the level is filled up, could be intentional to avoid losing copy after intra-level rotation, or could be my computer wasn't up all day for 24 hourly backup before the daily one, we got a bubble. I believe both issues are originated from the same design choice. Instead of 'mv alpha.(retain - 1) beta.0', it should cp alpha.(ls alpha.* | sort -nr | head -n1) beta.0, and not rotate beta when there's no alpha.