FAQ: Cleaning Backups

BuddyBackup keeps all of your old documents, even if you delete the original.

It even keeps older versions of your files, so you can go back in time to a previous document if you want to.

However, this uses up your backup space, so you may want to occassionaly clean up your backups.

The Remove Old Backups tool will help you do this.

It works as follows:

• Old files which you have deleted are remove from your backups
  
• ...but only if they've been deleted for a certain number of days
  
• Old versions of files which still exist are tidied up
• ...but only versions which are older than a certain number of days
  

To run the tool:

1. In the menu at the top of BuddyBackup, click on Tools
2. Click Remove Old Backups
3. Set the counter to an amount in days. This value is used to decide which files to clean up.
   
4. Click Remove Old Backups.

WARNING: This tool will also delete backups of files even if you accidentally deleted them (since it won't know the difference). To reduce this risk, set the days setting to a high value such as "30". This means that items deleted recently won't get removed straight away. You'd have 30 days to realise your mistake and recover the file, before it gets cleaned up.

You can make this tool run automatically. To do this:

1. In the menu at the top of BuddyBackup, click on Options
2. Click Advanced button
   
3. Click Advanced Settings
   
4. Tick the setting Automatically remove backups older than...
5. Enter a value in the days box
   

BuddyBackup will regularly do a clean-up for you automatically