Retention policy doesn't work for some backup jobs

[Jonathan]

For some reason, out of 15 Hyper-V backup jobs, three jobs just keep on accumulating restore points. For most jobs, retention policy is set at 60 days. With these three jobs, the oldest file on disk was a full backup (vbk) file, followed by ~220 vbr files. We use Incremental as a default, synthetic full every weekend. Appearently, this has not worked for quite some time.

I assumed that if I ran a manual Full backup, this would release the restore points to be removed. However, this didn't work as expected. The job finished without any mention of "Removing ********.vrb as per retention policy". I've even set the job storage setting to Reverse Incremental and ran another full backup.

Now I could just remove the restore points manually, but I'd like to keep things clean and I would like to see this working properly again. Any suggestions?

[Shestakov]

Hello, Jonathan.
Did you have any errors with synthetic full job runs?
As for newly created full backups, until you have 60 restore points in your new chain, the older one will not be deleted, because its latest restore points are still within the retention.
Thanks!

[Jonathan]

Hi Nikita,

As far as I can tell, there are no errors for the past few weeks with synthetic fulls. I started a synthetic full this afternoon and it ran fine.

All jobs are at least a year old. They target Hyper-V cluster shared volumes, not individual VMs.

[Shestakov]

If you have synthetic full working fine with retention = 60 restore points, 220 restore points is not an expected behavior.
Let me just check one thing. You've said you have 15 jobs, retention is 60 and you have 220 backup files. Do you mean 220 files in general or 220 files generated by one job?
By the way, how often synthetic full is scheduled?
Thanks!

[Jonathan]

There are 60 (61) backup files per job, it’s just these three jobs that have ~220 (per job).

Synthetic fulls are scheduled every saturday/sunday, depending on the job.

[Shestakov]

Got it.
That is unexpected behavior, so I would recommend to contact the support team.
Once you do, please post the case number here.
Thanks!