I have question regarding full backups, I always use forever forward incremental method one full backup then 30 days incremental and keep overwriting, now due to policies and immutability. I require to create a new set of backups with, but I don't want to keep digging and deleting old backups by myself and I want to have this deleted automatically after the retention period ends.
I want to manage this in the same way (1) Monthly Active Full backup (30) restore points / (1) New full active backup (30) days restore points then delete the old full backups with the old restore points, but I want to make sure that I'm doing this correctly:
Just for information:
1) the 1 monthly is unnecessary, because there would be only one additional full anyway.
2) "Remove deleted items" is for deleted VMs from production. It's irrelevant for the retention, but does not do any harm.
3) retention is configured with the "retention policy" option. With 30 points plus monthly active full with one backup run per day, the final result will be two full backups and around 60 increments (depending how long the month is).
In addition, if you're going with immutability, you'll probably use the hardened Linux repository with XFS? If so, I would suggest that you do Synthetic Fulls instead of Active Fulls as you'll benefit from fast cloning.
Unfortunately with synthetic I have to do full backups on a Weekly basis and the repo that I have assigned has other backups as well, I don't want to get out of space.
That's why I asked if you're using XFS. On XFS synthetic full backups use fast cloning and only take as much space as an incremental run. So you'll be able to save much storage space, run faster backups, but still have full backups for immutability.
