Zip backup on OneDrive and retaining previous versions

[rossmcm]

I want to implement a regular cumulative backup to the cloud (OneDrive). I have one profile that runs regularly (every 4 hours) and backs up various source folders to a local folder C:\Cumulative\. Versioning is enabled so that in addition to the source file, I have numbered previous versions in the same folder.

Another profile takes the contents of C:\Cumulative\ and creates a mirror of it on the local drive, except that every file is zipped and encrypted.

A third profile takes C:\Cumulative (Zipped)\ and updates it to OneDrive.

I know I can probably get by without the three-stage approach but I wanted to be able to see what was going on with the versioning. I also wanted a local unencrypted copy of the previous generations of the source files, so I could easily retrieve them if need be.

Having implemented this setup I selected a small test set of files, and ran the three profiles in sequence several times, each time touching one of the files to cause it to be backed up. I got puzzling results.

The first step behaved as I thought it should, previous generations were kept, though it looks to me as if the entire chain of previous versions is renamed, so:

- File$3$.txt is renamed to File$4$.txt,
- File$2$.txt is renamed to File$3$.txt,
- File$1$.txt is renamed to File$2$.txt,
- File.txt is renamed to File$1$.txt
- the latest revision is backed up as File.txt

However step 2 ignored the previous versions - a zip file was created only of the latest version of the file. Consequently the OneDrive image contained no earlier previous versions.

How might I trick Syncovery into copying/zipping the previous generations as well?

Assuming I can get step two to behave as wanted, with the earlier generations also copied, will Syncovery then recreate the entire set of ZIP files because of the renaming of every previous version? Why does Syncovery rename them in this way? If the existing older version filenames were left alone, and the highest numbered file was the most recent, then the rename operations for each new version would reduce to:

- File.txt is renamed to File$4$.txt
- the latest revision is backed up as File.txt

and the subsequent amount of traffic to OneDrive would be greatly reduced.

I'm not sure, but I believe OneDrive doesn't support file datestamping. Do I need to enable the datestamping in the profile, given that each file is zipped, and the ZIP format preserves the datestamp anyway?

[superflexible]

If you use "Filename Encoding" as renaming scheme for backups, it will not rename all the old versions and thus save traffic for further off-site copying.