More Restore Points than Expected

[EmptySet]

Hello,

I'm having some issues understanding the backup chain and am hoping someone can point me in the right direction.

Up until recently, I was using 7 retention points with forward incremental and weekly Synthetic backups but I decided to change it to Active backups after reading about synthetic and deduplication on the drive. However, what I am noticing is that I have more than 7 restore points. Some have 10, some have 9, and one has 21 restore points. Is this happening because of the changes I made from Synthetic to Active or another reason? I would think that 21 restore points would be enough that it would have 'resync'd' and cleaned up to 7?

Would it be better to make two backup schedules per backup (one for daily and one for weekly)?

Thanks.

[PetrM]

Hello,

There is no difference between weekly synthetic and full backup from retention policy perspective, an obsolete chain will be removed once the actual one consists of 7 points: 1 vbk + 6 vib.
You may take a look at this article which contains animated description of forward incremental chains.

In your particular case, I'd suggest to check creation date of the last .vbk for those VMs which have more than 7 restore points.
There is no benefit to have 2 schedules/jobs, it's enough to have the single job for daily incremental and weekly full backups.

Thanks!

[EmptySet]

Hi Petr,

In the folder where I have 21 restore points, I have two vbk files (one on 2/3 and one on 2/23)... it failed the full backups in between due to space issues. So I have 2 vbks, 18 vib and 1 vbm file. Should it not have removed the older files or will it not do that now until the next full active on 3/1?

Thanks.

[PetrM]

As far as I understand, the actual chain was started on 2/23 when the last full backup has been successfully created.
The whole previous chain (before 2/23) will be removed once the actual chain contains 7 restore points: 2/29 as long as the job is scheduled to run daily.

By the way, one more example of retention policy logic can be found on our help center.

Thanks!

[EmptySet]

So maybe I am misunderstanding and I believe your last link might have helped me understand it; even though the retention policy is set to 7 restore points, it needs to have a backup chain with 7 restore points (not just 7 points in general). So for example, I have another folder with 11 items (1 .vbm, 2 .vbk and 8 .vib files; .vbk on 2/14, .vibs 2/15 to 2/20 and then another .vbk on 2/21 and two more .vib on 2/22 and 2/23. Is it keeping the 2/14 through 2/20 because those 7 backups satisfy the backup chain requirement of 7 retention points and it will add another 7 until it has a complete chain and then remove the first chain?

Thanks.

[PetrM]

Yes, that's right, exactly as it's described in the article.

Thanks!