Backup Copy GFS Retention

[Aburns]

We currently have a customer who is sending Backup Copies to our Cloud Scale Out Repository. This repository is not set to do Per VM backups so we should have one backup a day for each job. Most of these jobs are set to retain 30 restore points with 2 months and 7 yearly GFS backups. We are currently seeing 63 backups for just about every job with this customer.

For one job just as an example, we have backups from 2/13/2021 to 4/13/2021 for a total of 61 backups excluding two VBK's. Am I misunderstanding how GFS works or is this expected behavior?

I have a case open with support to see if they can help us out with this but I also wanted to ask here to see if anyone else has had the same issue before.

Case #04751930

[foggy]

Hi Adam, do you have the 'Read from source...' check box enabled in the job settings? It effectively switches the backup copy to a forward incremental mode, for which the larger number of restore points in the chain is expected, depending on the moment in time. I don't know your particular job settings but our engineers will be able to tell whether the behavior you're seeing is expected and advise on the proper settings for what you're trying to achieve. Thanks!

[Aburns]

Hey Foggy, the 'Read the entire restore point from source backup' is not enabled which is what I think you are talking about. I thought by default now BCJ's are forever forward incremental?

The backup copy jobs are configured mostly the same just a few more or less GFS backups.

Periodic Copy (pruning) copying every day.
Same Target with encryption enabled.
Direct data transfer.
As for schedule its set for any time.

Perhaps I'm missing something obvious. Hopefully support will be able to explain what i'm doing wrong.

[foggy]

Correct, with this check box disabled backup copy is forever forward incremental. Let's see for the engineer's closer look at the setup as this looks unexpected to me.