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It's impossible to implement something like that in Akeeba Backup. Erasing an individual from your site does not only involve removing the core Joomla! data for that user i.e. the user record and user notes or even all the articles they may have created. It typically also involves removing information you have about them from third party extensions such as e-commerce*, comments, ticket systems, subscriptions* and so on. With thousands of extensions out there and dozens of versions for each extension it's impractical for us to develop a solution which lets you create data retention rules or you to set it up. This would be a massively expensive and complicated system.

* Note that GDPR has exceptions. You are supposed to remove personal information where removing this information is not against the law. For example, our obligation to retain sales information for 10 years (tax code) outweighs your right to be forgotten, therefore no action should be taken with this data. If this data is also linked to the user profile then the Joomla user profile must not be removed either BUT it can be anonymized / scrubbed.

The correct approach is to have an audit log of the GDPR actions you take and reply them when you are restoring a backup. In practice, this is much easier than it sounds. You will not be receiving hundreds of GDPR requests per day. It's more like a few dozen every year. This makes manual compliance on restored backups much cheaper than full automation.

Further to that, Akeeba Backup allows you to restore your site to a staging, development or local server. Therefore, if you have GDPR actions between the backup and the restoration you can restore on a non-live server, apply the GDPR-related actions, back it up and then restore it on top of the live site.

An alternative to that would be the development (by you) of a command line script which takes a source of user IDs and takes predefined actions. Maybe it'd be a bit more complicated e.g. you need a flag whether this is a client you need to retain information for other legal reasons or an individual who can be wiped clean off your site without any side effect. Your mileage may vary (the implementation is always specific to YOUR business). This means that you can replay the entire GDPR log automatically and that can be part of your restoration procedure either manually (when restoring a backup by hand) or automated (when restoring a backup with UNiTE). By using an anonymized source of information (numeric user IDs) you do not run afoul the GDPR regulations.

GDPR is not the end of the world. It merely codifies the existing right to be forgotten. The bottom line is that public information must be removed AND the information of the GPDR subject cannot be used for data processing. For example, when it comes to our site a valid GDPR implementation is: delete all tickets, scrub the username, name and email of the Joomla user record (e.g. username = User123, name = User 123, [email protected]) and lock the account. We still have to keep your invoices and sales records for a minimum of 10 years. Of course this means that if you come back later and tell us "hey, I have invoice 12345 from you" we won't be able to help you since you no longer exist for us. A tax record exists but it's immutable and can't be linked back to your scrubbed user account or your now deleted information.

Regarding keeping backups, I don't see anything in the GDPR which prevents you from storing backups containing personal information as long as you can ensure that this information will not see the light of day (unless it's legally required). GDPR is about blocking access to personal information when the subject requests so. So keeping backups is not a problem as far as I can tell. I am not a lawyer. Ask your lawyer if you're not sure.