retention policy in backup copy job

[sam.ngai]

Hi all,
I have set up a backup copy job for a backup job recently. And the restore point of both are 7 points.
The backup job is used to backup VMs to local storage and the copy job will sent the copy to offsite storage.
And I used forever forward incremental and specified the date of active full backup(every Sunday).
But I found that when there were 7 restore points(1 full +6 incremental), and the active full backup created a new full backup.
The previous 7 points will not be remove when exceeding the number of restore points.

For the offsite storage, when there had 8 restores points, it will merge the full backup with the first incremental. And it makes sense.

Therefore, why the previous 7 restore points aren't be removed when there has 8 restore points?

[mma]

Check this:
https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/agent ... tml?ver=20

Yes, it's Agent for Windows, but this is the same for every "classical" backup with Full + Inc. It's also not limited to Veeam, that's how any Full + Incremental Backup chain works.

To be able to restore data from a Veeam Agent backup, you need to have a full backup file and a chain of subsequent incremental backup files on the disk. If you delete a full backup file, the whole chain of incremental backup files will become useless. In a similar manner, if you delete any incremental backup file before the point to which you want to roll back, you won’t be able to restore data (since later incremental backup files depend on earlier incremental backup files).

For this reason, if you create an active full backup manually or set up the backup job to create active full backups, in some days there will be more restore points on the disk than specified by retention policy settings. Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows will remove the full backup chain only after the last incremental backup file in the chain becomes outdated.

For example, the retention policy is set to 3 restore points. A full backup file is created on Sunday, incremental backup files are created Monday through Saturday, and an active full backup is scheduled on Thursday. Although the retention policy is already breached on Wednesday, the full backup is not deleted. Without the full backup, backup chain would be useless, leaving you without any restore point at all. Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows will wait for the next full backup file and 2 incremental backup files to be created, and only then will delete the whole previous chain, which will happen on Saturday

[foggy]

In addition, when you enable either active or synthetic full, the job automatically switches from [url=vhttps://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/vsphere/incremental_forever_backup.html?ver=95]forever forward incremental[/url] to simple forward incremental, since forever forward doesn't require periodic fulls.