No, we were talking about the deletion interval of past messages. I.e., so the backup file won’t be that large. I actually take daily backups of my profiles like so:
To also retain your connections, you would need to dump a different set of tables, such as bobstate, broadcast_secrets, chats, chats_contacts, config, contacts, keypairs, public_keys and maybe more. It’s usually easier the other way around: copy the database file, delete the blobs, messages and caches and vacuum so you won’t leave out anything important. Could still be done with a few lines of shell script, but I think it would be easier to install DC on a separate device (or a bot) with reduced message retention timeout in multi-device mode so it keeps syncing your ID from your main device as long as it’s online.