Retention policy for outdated backups in conjunction with GFS retention policy

[sandsturm]

Hi

Our virtual machine backupjobs are configured to have a retention policy of 32 days and keep weekly fulls for 13 weeks (GFS retention). Backup mode is incremental with a synthetic full every friday, the job runs once a day for seven days a week. The retention policy for outdated backups is set to 5 days (5 days only for this test purpose, usually its more, we use per-machine backup files on our SOBR extents).

I tested the deletion behavior. I deleted a VM 8 days ago and therefore the VM has no backup created for 8 days now and therefore in my opinion all backups should be deleted due to the 5 days retention policy for outdated backups, but anyway I still see the GFS created weekly backups are still there. Are GFS backups not affected by the deletion policy or how do I have to understand that? Could not find anything in the documentation about this behavior.

thx for clarification
sandsturm

[Mildur]

Hi sandsturm

Correct, GFS flagged backups are not affected by the deleted item retention.

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=110

Retention policy for deleted items does not apply to full backup files to which GFS flags are assigned.

Thanks
Fabian

[sandsturm]

Hi Fabian

Okay, good to know. Thanks for your fast reply. Do I have to delete such GFS-retention backups manually or will they be removed one by one until the GFS retention (in my example 13 weeks) is reached?

thx
sandsturm

[Mildur]

Your welcome.
A gfs restore point will be removed automatically when the retention period is over So you should see them get removed one by one weekly or monthly, depending on what gfs flags and retention they have.

Or you can remove all gfs restore points for a single machine manually in the console at once.
https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=110

[sandsturm]

okay, thank you. If GFS restore points will be removed automatically it is totally fine for. I just don't want to have any orphaned data

thx a lot,
sandsturm