Compress and Roll Off Database Backups

The automatic copy of the database created every 3 days currently grows unbounded.  Most software that creates automatic database dumps compresses the dumps and keeps a set number.

 

As an example: My database is 175MB. I had 30 backup files going back 90 days.  This consumed 5.25GB.  If I compress these backups, each one drops to 28MB or a total of 0.84GB.  If they were compressed and rolled off after 30 days we would be down to an acceptable 280MB used.

 

Compression tests:

Current backup: 173.9MB

Apple Archive (zip): 28.7MB

gzip: 27.7MB

bzip2: 21.4MB

xz: 14.9MB

Early 2021 clean-up: duplicate