Job setup to overwrite?

[CTS-Tech]

Our backup repository is 2 TB in size, and recently we received a warning: "Backup location is getting low on free disk space". Will Veeam overwrite the oldest restore points and the new backup succeed, or will we run out of space and the new backup fail?

[Gostev]

The backup will fail. Deletion of old backups is handled by the retention policy that you set in the job, and this only happens after the job runs successfully.

[CTS-Tech]

Thanks. So if I change the number of restore point from 14 to say 10 - the old ones will be deleted?

[veremin]

It depends on which type of backup is being used.

If you’re using reversed incremental backup, earliest reverse increment will be deleted immediately, as it exceeds the number specified in the retention policy.

It’s slightly different with a forward incremental backup. If you want to restore your data, full backup and a chain of subsequent increments on disk is needed. The whole chain of increments will become useless, if your full backup is deleted. The same picture with increment deletion - you won’t be able to restore your data, since later increments depend on the earlier ones.

Thus, if you’re using forward incremental backup, you may sometime notice that there will be more restore points on disk than specified by your retention policy (see this existing topic). Veeam Backup & Replication will remove the full backup chain only after the last increment in the chain exceeds your retention policy; which is likely to happen once the retention policy reaches the next full backup.

More information regarding retention policy can be found in the corresponding User Guide (p.30).

Hope this helps.
Thanks.

[CTS-Tech]

Thank you. We are using Reverse Incremental and set the number of restore points from 14 to 10. On the first attempt it failed, but on the retry it succeeded. It must have deleted the old jobs on the first attempt.

[foggy]

Retention policy is applied at the end of each successful job run. That's why restore points were not removed on the first attempt.