VAW incrementals not respecting retention time

[Moopere]

Hi Folks,

Running extensive testing on a bunch of Veeam products one of which is VAW (v2.1 free)

Ongoing daily backups (incremental) with once a week full and two day retention doesn't behave in the way I'm expecting.

My expectation was that we'd get the full, followed by 2 days of inc. and then on the third day the oldest inc. would be merged into the full ... leaving the (updated) full + 2 days of inc. This expectation has come out of the VAW (free) docs.

However, in reality, I'm seeing the full + daily inc's that seem to just go on forever until some random event happens (like last week) where all of a sudden the backup engine does a mass clean up and leaves you with the last full + 2 incs.

Even last weeks scheduled full wasn't done, instead I got an inc.

Testing is being done on two servers (2012R2) and the backup is directed at a share (hosted by Win10).

Any ideas?

[Dima P.]

Hi Moopere.

Any chance you have periodic full backup option checked (at the destination step go under Advanced to check the configurations). Thanks!

[Moopere]

Yes, periodic fulls are being done - once a week.

On the third day after the last full (saturday), one of the two test servers did a massive clean up, on its own, and deleted the previous weeks full + all the previous weeks incrementals

The other test server seems to have automatically decided to skip the Saturday full ... I've got no idea why, and instead did an incremental. That server now has 11 inc sets + 1 full from two weeks ago.

None of this seems to follow what the VAW (free) docs say about retention unless I'm misreading.

I think I read on the forums somewhere that the free version of VAW doesn't do merges of inc's into full's - the licensed version is supposed to do this - though I believe the online docs tells us otherwise and that both versions do this.

In any event, what is the meaning of 'retention days' when there are scheduled fulls being done?

[Moopere]

So another week has passed. Problem server #1 did decide this Saturday to do a Full as per the schedule, so thats good. It missed Sundays Inc though, for no reason, so thats bad. Its now got:

- A full from 30th June followed by
- 13 incs (a scheduled Full on 7th July was missed and instead an inc was done by the system ... no user intervention)
- Another full 14th July
- An inc 16th July (15th Inc missing ... no idea why)

The other server, acting somewhat more sanely, has, this morning, deleted the Full from the 7th + the 6 incs that followed it from last week, leaving the last Saturday Full (SAT 14th) + 2 incs, 15th and 16th.

So ... I'm gathering then, that the '2 days' retention means that after 2 inc days, any previous backup chains are deleted, at least for the free version. As VAW free doesn't appear to merge incs into fulls, it can't do anything with the incs that are created after a full until another full is created and two more incs are done.

I have to further assume that if one doesn't do another full, then inc's will be created forever ... again, this seems logical, given observation, at least with the free version.

[Dima P.]

Hello Moopere,

If you are running Active Full backup incrementals are never merged into full backup. Instead, new backup chain is started after Active Full backup and previous chain gets removed only after the last increment in the chain is retired. Active Full schedule completely relies on regular job schedule, so you must have you backup jobs configured to run at the day when Active Full should be performed. Makes sense?