I have a question regarding the retention policy in Veeam Backup & Replication.
I've configured the retention policy for a cloud backup job to 7 days. However, I’m currently seeing 25 restore points in the backup repository for this job, and the number keeps growing.
System Details:
Veeam Version: Veeam Backup & Replication 12.2.0.334
Environment: Physical Windows Server 2019 Standard running VBR, with 3 Hyper-V virtual servers
Backup Jobs:
Job 1: Hyper-V backup to external HDD – retention policy works as expected.
Job 2: Backup of the physical server to external HDD (Managed by backup server) – retention policy works as expected.
Job 3: Backup of the physical server to Cloud Connect repository (Managed by backup server) – issue with retention policy here.
Configuration of the Problematic Job (Job 3):
Job Mode: Server - Managed by backup server
Target Computer: IP of the physical server
Backup Mode: Entire Computer
Storage: Cloud Connect repository
Retention Policy: 7 days
Advanced Settings: Create synthetic full backups weekly; Storage-level corruption check monthly
Guest Processing: Application-aware processing enabled
Initially, I suspected that the retention policy issue was due to insufficient space for the synthetic full backups. However, after allocating additional space, the synthetic full backup is working as expected.
After the synthetic full backup it just keeps going with incremental backups, leaving the old files untouched.
The goal with this setup is to be able to selectively restore either the entire cluster or just individual files from the file server, or some other.
Any advice on why the retention policy might not be applying as expected would be greatly appreciated!
Also: The initial full backup for the cloud repository was done via an external drive due to the client’s limited internet speed.
Thanks in advance for your help!
Kind regards,
Alex