Weekly Active Full Backup Retention Policy

[dtyraj]

Hello all together,

I have a question for weekly active full backups retention policy.
First of all we have two different Backup Jobs, one Daily incremental and one weekly active full backup job.

We have a Synology Rackstation where we perform Daily Incremental Backups on weekdays, which are working without problems so far.
Then we have on this Rackstation a 4-TB HDD for Weekly Active Full Backups connected. The Active Full Backups are performed every Saturday on this HDDs, which is being changed every week.

Now the problem is that the retention policy apparently is not working for the active full backup. I set the retention policy to 4, but the HDDs are running out of space because there are 6 Full Backups on the HDD now. So the retention policy is not working and doesn't delete the older backups.

Regards
dtyraj

[Shestakov]

Hello Daniel and welcome to the community!

First of all we have two different Backup Jobs, one Daily incremental and one weekly active full backup job.
... I set the retention policy to 4, but the HDDs are running out of space because there are 6 Full Backups on the HDD now.

Have you set retention policy = 4 for both jobs? Do you have any full backups scheduled for the daily job?
6 can be a fair number of .vbks in your case. "Active Full job" is to have 4 fulls and "incremental one" may have 2 if it works an incremental method.

By the way, do these jobs backup same VM(s)?
Thanks!

[dtyraj]

Hallo and thanks for the fast reply!

For the Daily Job the retention is still at 7, because on the Rackstation is enough space.
The Daily Backup Job contains a Synthetic Full Backup every Sunday, so in case of the 7 days retention I have Full on Sunday, then from Monday to Friday Incremental (Saturday nothing), Sunday again the Full, so I have always 2 Full and 5 Incremental on my Rackstation.

For the Weekly (Active Full) I have just Full Backups (just .vbk) on the external HDD.

Yes both Jobs contains exactly the same VMs (7, with about 1.7 TB in total).

[Shestakov]

Thanks for the clarification.
So the problem is that you have 6 full backups instead of 4 of the weekly backup job?
The reason why I asked if you backed up same VMs is that you may use a single job and just backup copy this chain with desired GFS retention settings, so you don`t need to backup same VMs twice during the weekend.

[dtyraj]

Yes that's right, because after 6 full backups the HDD runs out of space, that's why I configured the retention policy with 4, but as I said it doesn't work.
Ok that sounds good, I will try this, so I have configured a backup copy job now for the weekend, but without the GFS retention because the HDDs are rotating every week, so I have just a normal retention policy with 4.
I will observe, if this is the better configuration for me.

Thanks for your help so far!

[Shestakov]

Oh, so you re-configured the job to have less restore points. Note that new retention is applied in the end of the job run, after new restore point is created, so I suppose in your case the job attempted to create a backup, but failed due to lack of free space and new retention has not been applied. Is that correct? If so, you can delete backups manually.
Thanks!

[dtyraj]

No that's not what I did, I reconfigured the job two weeks ago, so the HDD was also changed, what I mean is, that after the reconfiguration 2 weekly backups were running, the first without problems because I deleted backups manually.
Thanks

[foggy]

Now the problem is that the retention policy apparently is not working for the active full backup. I set the retention policy to 4, but the HDDs are running out of space because there are 6 Full Backups on the HDD now. So the retention policy is not working and doesn't delete the older backups.

Have you designated this repository as the one using rotated drives? What type of repository it is (retention will apply in case of a Windows repository only)?

[dtyraj]

The repository is a network storage, so it is connected via CIFS. And on this network storage the HDDs are connected via USB.

[foggy]

Then the only option to maintain the required number of restore points on disk is using some cleanup pre- or post-job script.

[WRS2200]

My company was running into a similar issue. We had one of our guys create a pre-job cleanup script that would remove the oldest files to make room for the next. We haven't retention issues since.