Forward incremental with synthetic fulls

[perjonsson1960]

Folks,

We have started using Veeam B&R 9.5 and the Windows Agent to backup our physical Exchange servers.
We have created backup jobs with Forward Incremental, 30 day retention cycle, incrementals every evening, and synthetic full backups on Saturday.
Since the synthetic full backup is based on the previous full backup plus the incrementals done after it, does that mean that e-mails that are deleted by the users between the full backups will be retained in the backup chain forever, since the new full backup is always based on the previous full backup? Is the 30 day retention cycle too much?
Or will Veeam start to remove the deleted e-mails from the backup chain when the retention cycle of 30 days has passed?

I am asking this because we are not sure what retention cycle we should use, and how to go about making off-site backup copies on disk, and subsequently copies to tape. We want to keep everything archived for at least ten years.

Sincerely,
Per Jonsson
Sweden

[PTide]

Hi,

<...> does that mean that e-mails that are deleted by the users between the full backups will be retained in the backup chain forever, since the new full backup is always based on the previous full backup? Is the 30 day retention cycle too much?

No, it does not. Each backup contains the state of the machine at the moment of the backup. That is, if the blocks where the emails had resided before deletion stay on the origianl machine, they will stay in the backup too. Once they are rewritten on the original machine, then they get also rewritten in the backup and will be deleted from the chain eventually. Please see check this animation.

Is the 30 day retention cycle too much?

That depends on your RPO requirements.

<...>and how to go about making off-site backup copies on disk<...>

That is what Backup Copy Job is for.

<...>, and subsequently copies to tape.

And that we have covered too

Thanks