Job Set for 14 Mount Points - 46 exist

[WinstonWolf]

Is the Solution to delete some vbks or vibs ?

[veremin]

You can either delete everything older that the latest full backup manually or lower retention temporarily, say, to 10 (or whatever number of RPs exist since the latest full backup) and let retention policy do exactly that but in automatic fashion. Thanks.

[Dr.Gerry]

I guess I must be missing something (or have something misconfigured....or messed up somehow), but I am struggling to understand the 'restore points to keep on disk' option in backup jobs. I have all my backups set to 14 restore points to keep on disk, but almost all of them have at least this many - they range from 15-24 restore points on disk.

Obviously I am doing something wrong......can anyone point me in the right direction?

[tdewin]

I imagine you have a Forward Incremental chain with Synthetic Full. Please review the following KB articles:
http://www.veeam.com/kb1932
https://www.veeam.com/kb1990
http://rps.dewin.me/?m=1&s=1000&r=14&c= ... ,0,0,1,0&e

Basically it has to do with the dependency of your oldest increment(s) (it is dependent on the whole previous chain).

If you have still follow up questions, do not hesitate to get back to this thread

[adrianIDC]

In my production with veeam b&R v8.

I configured all jobs to retention 5 points.
I find sometimes that every job has saved restore points 7/10, preventing me execute new tasks for lack of storage.

You should not do it automatically?

[PTide]

Hi,

That can happen during forward incremental if intermediate fulls are configured, and it's absolutely normal (more info here). Is that the case?

Thanks

[SaAtomic]

I read trough the helpcenter entries for retention, weekly full backups and other, but I'm still note quite sure.

If I were to create one backup job, with daily incremental backups of a number of VMs (no synthetic full backups), with a retention of 7 days and an active full backup weekly.
Would I end up with 7 restore points, whereas one of which is a full backup and the rest are only the changes from the last full backup, for each VM?

So in total, 1 full backup from the weekly active full backup and 6 incremental backup.

[foggy]

Depending on the day of the week, you will have from 7 (1 full + 6 increments) till 13 (2 fulls + 11 increments) restore points on disk. Please see the visual explanation above.

[mrchongo]

My Veeam backup jobs are configured to retain 8 restore points. My logic: a week plus a day of daily backup files. Yet, when I look in the backup repository folder there are 13 daily backup files plus the metadata file. What's up with that? I was expecting 8 files plus the metadata file. How can I reduce that number to conserve storage space?

Thanks in advance.

[BartP]

Can you tell us what backup method you are using?
Usually this is because you have either an active or synthetic full backup planned. This causes you to have more restore points on disk than specified in the job.
https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... tml?ver=95

[veremin]

Most likely, you're using forward incremental with periodic fulls backup mode, so, in your case number of restore points will vary from 8 to 15.

To have on disk the exact number of restore points specified consider switching to either reversed incremental or forward forever incremental mode.

Thanks.

[Simpleacc]

Hello all,

I would like to ask you if it is normal or we have something wrong because we have a problem with our storage space.

We are using Veeam 9.5 Update 4 and our backup jobs configuration is the following:
- Restore points to keep on disk: 5
- Scheduled for: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. (incremental)
- Create a synthetic full backups periodically on Friday.

The 'problem' is that for example, on Thursday we have around 9 restore points per VM when our policy is 5 restore retention.
For example for a job that makes the full on Friday and incrementals on weekday, we have the following:

13/03 - Increment
12/03 - Increment
11/03 - Increment
08/03 - Full
07/03 - Increment
06/03 - Increment
05/03 - Increment
04/03 - Increment
01/03 - Full

From my point of view, if we have a 5 restore points retention, it should be like:

13/03 - Increment
12/03 - Increment
11/03 - Increment
08/03 - Full
07/03 - Increment

Why is not the case? Something is missconfigured?

Best regards,

[DGrinev]

Hi Javier,

Nothing wrong, the backup chain length is normal for the Forward Incremental backup method.
When the second Full backup will have 4 increments, the first five RPs will be deleted by retention.

Here is animated KB1932 it will help you to understand the forward incremental retention.

Thanks!

[Simpleacc]

Hello!

Ho! I can see, thanks for the clarification. I appreciate it.

Best reagrds

[JasonPGTF]

Hi, I'm hoping if anyone could give a brief explanation on how the retention works for Veeam B&R? Currently my company is using commvault to perform backups but we're slowly moving most of our VMs to Veeam. For Commvault the retention for full backups are 3 months while incremental is 1 month. How do I set in Veeam to have the similar types of retention?

[HannesK]

Hello,
because many customers lost data because they did not copy their backups to a second repository / location, we don't allow GFS (weekly, monthly, yearly) backups on primary backup jobs today.

That means you have two options
1) use a backup copy job (recommended)
2) create two backup jobs pointing to one repository. One that runs daily (31 restore points) and one that runs monthly (3 restore points)

Veeam retention is based on restore points today. If you want to save data for a specific time, you need to calculate with the schedule. Example: 31 restore points if the schedule is 1x daily

Best regards,
Hannes

[DGrinev]

Hi Jason,

Can you elaborate on the preferred schedule of the backup job?
Please review this big thread for additional information about Retention Policy. Thanks!

[JasonPGTF]

Hello,
because many customers lost data because they did not copy their backups to a second repository / location, we don't allow GFS (weekly, monthly, yearly) backups on primary backup jobs today.

That means you have two options
1) use a backup copy job (recommended)
2) create two backup jobs pointing to one repository. One that runs daily (31 restore points) and one that runs monthly (3 restore points)

Veeam retention is based on restore points today. If you want to save data for a specific time, you need to calculate with the schedule. Example: 31 restore points if the schedule is 1x daily

Best regards,
Hannes

Currently there is only a single copy of backups and stored on a single location. This has been our practice on our previous Commvault tool as well. Do you meant I will need to change my restore point to 31 points which runs daily?

Basically my current configuration on commvault is a weekly full backups followed by daily incremental. The retention is 3 months for fulls and 1 month for incremental.
On veeam currently it's 14 restore points with 1 synthetic full backup every saturday.

[HannesK]

31 RPs based on a 24h schedule is correct for the 1 month incrementals.

[JasonPGTF]

How about the 3 months retention for a weekly full backups? Currently it's running every saturday, but I'm not sure what's the retention like.

[HannesK]

it depends whether you really want to put all eggs in one basket. If yes (same like you do today), then I would create a second job as mentioned earlier and run it weekly with an incremental forever mode and 13 restore points (usually 12 should be enough to cover 12 weeks / 3 months but just in case of some strange date thing I might have forgotten)

Keep in mind that you cannot apply the policy from your old software to Veeam 1:1.

[atakacs]

Hello

Probably a fairly basic question...

I have a vSphere to disk backup configure to maintain 5 restore points



Yet my disk is now out of space with 11 restore points



Not quite sure what I am missing - I understand that there might be some interaction between restore point vs full back vs incremental backup vs some other setting.

My question would be: is it possible to do incremental backups with a set number of restore points ? Or do I have to switch to systematic full backup ? In any case this is not as user friendly as it could be IMHO

[wishr]

Hi Alexandre,

Please carefully review these articles for clarification: 1, 2. We have some simplification planned

I've merged your question with an existing thread since this has been discussed many times - definitely recommend checking it out.

Thanks

[atakacs]

Please carefully review these articles for clarification: 1, 2. We have some simplification planned

Thanks - I am trying to understand the implications of the respective methods.

To be honest for the "layman" (that's me this could indeed be simplified - at the very least a GUI showing the consequences of specific settings vs actual results - or even better a GUI that would allow to user to define what is wanted and VBR actually figuring out the way(s) to do it...

[ejenner]

Hi guys,

One of my backups is showing 45 restore points available if you open the 'restore' dialogue boxes. But when looking at the settings only 21 restore points are configured?

This is also visible in the files stored on the repository. i.e. 45 files are in the folder.

Are there any well known scenarios which could lead to this discrepancy?

[PTide]

Hi,

Do you have intermediate fulls configured in your retention settings?

Thanks!

[foggy]

Please review the thread above - it describes such scenarios in detail. Thanks!

[ejenner]

It's 5 pages long... got any clues?

[veremin]

You can find the detailed answer on the first page. Thanks!

[foggy]

And this KB article contains a visual explanation for better understanding.