We have a couple of teams on services that are interested in preserving backups long term to meet specific compliance needs. To meet this need we created a ghe-preserve.

Looking to get feedback to see if something like this would be useful for inclusion.

What it does:

• create a date and hour range matching strategy
  • hourly snapshots for 48 hours
  • 14 days
  • 8 weeks (sunday)
  • 24 months
  • 5 years
• files matching the generated times/dates are copied to a 'preserve' folder assuming they do not already exist
• files in the preserve folder not matching hourly and dates are deleted
  • special care taken for edge cases (e.g. 48 hours can span 3 calendar days)

Other

• It never modifies an existing snapshot
• shellcheck mostly happy
• I did not update ghe-backup-config to include the preserve path, probably should
• I'm using arrays in a few places despite the style guide. I'd be interested in feedback and learning more in terms of avoiding this
• I didn't make it configurable because date time work coupled with deleting directories is honestly pretty scary and having a single state is easier.
• Not knowing a ton about how these snapshots work, is moving this data even viable for a restore assuming a user had to restore a snapshot from for example 18 months ago.