Best way to get Veeam to return some storage space back

[kjstech]

Hello,

I have 3 veeam jobs that have 14 restore points and run nightly, so that's 2 full weeks of nightly backups. I then have 3 veeam backup copy jobs that run starting every Sunday 22:00 and keep the following restore points for archival purposes is set to:
Weekly: 4
Monthly: 3
Quarterly: 0
Yearly: 0

I have an Exagrid deduplicating appliance and we are now down to 9% free space. Exagrid just takes in whatever Veeam sends to it via the Veeam accelerated data movers, so to manage this space I have to turn to the Veeam application. Since were now down to a minimum free space, whats the most effective way I could have Veeam free up some space on the Exagrid? Would changing the monthly from 3 to 2 make much of an impact?

I really don't want to run into an issue here and I'm on vacation next week so I want to make sure the environment is healthy!

Thanks for your input, its greatly appreciated!

[Zew]

AFAIK retention deletion doesn't happen till after a most recent job completes. During a full backup file merge [GFS].

not sure what the size of each VM is so, can't really calculate values. It will return space, but how much I dunno.

[unsichtbarre]

How many "Restore points to keep" do you have specified?

I dealt with similar space issues and backup copy jobs, but I had the "Restore points to keep" set to 14! The Backup Copy job was keeping 14 daily incremental plus my desired long-term policy (3 months, 4 quarters, 3 years)

Once I turned "Restore points to keep" down to 2 (the minimum), now I get the long-term retention I initially set out to create plus two daily incremental backup points.

-J

[Zew]

What do you have set for your "Copy Every" setting at the first section of a backup copy job?

[foggy]

Also, do both backup and backup copy jobs point to ExaGrid, or backups are stored separately and ExaGrid is used as a secondary repository only?

Basically, you can lower the GFS retention and it will be applied on the next job cycle.

[kjstech]

Ok both jobs go to exagrid. There is an exagrid share for backup copy jobs with -archive at the tail end of the repository name. The solution has been in place since about the 3rd week of January. Its taken about 7 months now to finally get the exagrid to now 9% free space. That's pretty solid in our opinion, but now we have to manage it to maintain that level or more without going over.

The backup copy job is set to copy every 7 days starting at 1:00 AM.
Restore points to keep: 2
It says keep the following restore points for archival purposes
Weekly backup: 4 (Sunday 22:00)
MOnthly backup 2 First Sunday of the month
Quarterly backup 0 First Sunday of the quarter
Yearly backup 0. First Sunday of the year
[X] Read the entire restore point from source backup instead of synthesizing it from increments.

If I click advanced, Performe backup files health deck is set for Monthly Last Saturday. There is nothing set for full backup file maintenance

We have 3 jobs pointing each to an NFS file system on a EMC VNX5200.
Each 3 job points to its own Target repository on Exagrid.
Those 3 jobs have associated backup copy jobs, so in total there are 6 jobs, 6 target repositories.
The original jobs are just set to keep 14 restore points on disk.

Exagrid itself replicates over 100mbps WAN to another Exagrid at a remote site for off site backup.

[foggy]

You can lower retention settings as described above and then check whether you have the number of fulls for each job that corresponds to your retention, just to make sure you're not storing anything old that was not removed for some reason.

[kjstech]

Thanks everyone for your input.
By changing the Monthly backup from 2 to 1 in all three backup copy jobs for our archival purposes, we went from 8% to 20% free space on our Exagrid EX21000E.

[WRS2200]

Thank you for the post. This helped me with some space issues of my own.