Help with Retention Policy

[guidoakd]

Hi everybody! Maybe someone can help me with this. I just want to figure it out which would be the correct way to make a specific backup.

This is an Exchange Backup, that makes a full backup on Saturdays, and incrementals backups during the week, on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. So, 6 (six) would be the restore points to keep on disk, is it ok?

Now, what i want, is that when the following Saturday i make another full backup, it "erases" automatically the other full and incremental backups, having only this full backup on disk before starting again. I attach an image to simplify what i'am saying. Which would be the correct way to do this? I've red about Synthetyc backups but is not what i want..

Thanks very much.
Guido.

[foggy]

Now, what i want, is that when the following Saturday i make another full backup, it "erases" automatically the other full and incremental backups, having only this full backup on disk before starting again.

You need to set retention to keep just a single restore point, so that Veeam B&R delete entire previous chain AFTER creating the new full (retention is applied at the end of the job). If you want to cleanup the files prior creating new full, then you can do it via pre-job script. However, the entire approach doesn't look solid to me, since one day you might find yourself without any valid restore point at all.

[guidoakd]

Hey, thanks for answering.. let me see if i've understood you.. i'll need to change the retention policy on Friday from 6 to 1? In order to make the new full on Saturday erasing the chain? In this case, is there anything to automate it?

Or always set 1 restore point (it applies only to full backups the "retention policy"?, not to incrementals? i don't think so..)
Thanks!
Guido.

[foggy]

If you set the job to keep just a single restore point, it will automatically remove previous full and its related increments right after creating the new full backup.

[tdewin]

Keep it to 1, but you need to enable an active full or a synthetic full. Veeam will not delete the oldest chain until the newest chain(s) completely satisfies the policy. Thus only when on saturday, a new chain has been created with 1 point, it will remove the old chain after backup.

However, if somebody during the week creates a manual full, a new chain will be created and thus the previous chain will be deleted. E.g somebody does an active full on wednesday. By that time you have
pre backup wednesday: F i i i
backup wednesday : F i i i F
post backup wednesday: F

If you don't enable active or synthetic full, the job will jump in forever incremental mode. In that case, the cleanup process will be a merge of the oldest increment with the only Full backup every day. As a result you will have only one point on disk every day. (and i believe then you have to set a minimum of 2 points but I'm not 100% sure)

Anyway if you want to have protection for the last 7 days, but you only want one Full on disk, you might consider Forever Incremental mode with 7 points. In that case you will have only 1 full + 6 increments at any time, consuming the same amount of space after backup as what you drew here (even less because during the full creation in your plan, there will be 2 full on disk during the backup). Just trying to understand your use case for this kind of configuration

[guidoakd]

Thank u very much. It worked perfectly setting the retention policy into 1. I have the incremental from yesterday and i hope on Saturday, the new full erases the chain.

Thanks. Guido.

[guidoakd]

Hey!, Again here. The retention worked good.. but i have a doubt.. i use to send to tape the full backups, but.. what would happend if in the middle i have incrementals backups? When you send the incrementals to tape.. it sends everything? including the full? Or the only way is to send the fullone at the very begenning before making the incrementals backups? Thanks! Guido

[foggy]

It sends all backups created since the last tape job run.