Backup Job Retention not reflected in files

[Hariseldon1]

<<I also submitted a support issue... forgive this redundant post, I am hoping to get the quickest response be it support ticket or on these forums>>
I am running Veeam Agent for Windows (free license) on Windows 10 Pro 21H2 (OS Build 19044.1645)

The backup job was configured:
-- backup "selected volumes + Operating System"
-- every 3 hours
-- keep backups for 7 days
-- Perform an active full backup every Saturday

The backup destination is a dedicated 2 TB SSD... and the backup destination is running very low on space.

Seeing the backup destionation low on space I reconfigured the backup job with the folloing change:
-- Perform an active full backup Monthly on the 1st Monday of every month

The backup destination has 45 files (667 GB) that are older than the configured "7 days" retention... Backup files from today (2022-05-10) going back to 2022-04-30 (ten days).

How do I enforce the backup job 7 day retention setting --- so as to clean up 667 GB of free space?
What other options are there I can do to free up free space?

Will Veaam Agent for Windows allow me to copy off the "Full backup" from the last date (2022-05-07) that the "saturday weekly full backup" ran?
^^^so as I could use to manually do a restore from if I needed to^^^

[jorgedlcruz]

Hello,
You have a few options to improve your Repository, but perhaps is a bit late as you already have backups:
- First if using Windows Server as Repository you can use ReFS, or Windows Dedupe, to do more with similar hardware, but seems you are using the same Windows 10, right?
- Second, you can not have just seven days using forward incremental. Why, simple, let's put that example of 7. Imagine your first backup was tuesday, you will have a chain that become inactive on saturday on your full, that is 5 days so can not delete as retention is still not 7, now it comes monday that is already seven points after it finishes, but the new chain is active, so it can not delete the inactive chain as it will be less than seven, now the next saturday comes and produces another chain, finally the first inactive chain will be deleted this day, but still it can not delete the previous as it will be less than seven points, etc.

If you want seven days and no more, you need to use forever forward incremental. My recommendation will be to use our calculator.veeam.com for VBR, it is just capacity. To give you an idea of storage needed, according to different scenarios, or even the rps if you want to see it daily https://rps.dewin.me/ with the emulator day after day.

Let us know