Just getting started - Question on Fulls

[Jason_H]

Hi,

I got the community edition and I'm backing up one 2010 exchange server. I have it doing a full backup with the application-aware log options set and it is running fine.

I initially set it up as Incremental with a synthetic full once a week, with a 7 day retention. I thought when the second full ran it would remove the first one but it is not doing that.

Firstly - is a full server backup the only option or is there a better one?
Second - is it not being deleted because of something silly, like I should have SIX days' retention because each full is at either end of the seven days specified?

I have (for now) disabled the weekly synthetics until I figure out why the fulls are not being deleted.

I have done some googling but I always end up back at the user guides, which I have read but do not see the solution in them.

Thanks in advance for your help.
Jason

[Gostev]

Hi, Jason.

Please note there's an info icon next to the retention setting that explains this when you hover over it. In short, this is by design of incremental backup, and it's very well explained in the User Guide > Forward Incremental Backup Retention Policy

Thanks!

[Jason_H]

Sorry, I'm not sure what icon you're talking about the but the info in the link you provided was helpful, thank you.

Just to be clear, the server is NOT a VM, it is a standalone physical server. The same logic applies? That could be part of the problem, I was not looking at the VM docs because it did not seem to be the correct place to look.

Is an "entire computer" backup the only/best way to back up an exchange 2010 server? I didn't think a volume or file level backup would do it but I'm not certain how it interacts with the application-aware portion. Fulls take up a large amount of space on the disk I am writing to, especially if I need to be able to fit three fulls on it before the first one gets deleted.

Thank you!

[backupquestions]

Jason,

You only need one full backup which is your initial backup at the very first run of your job. If you leave both the active and synthetic periodic fulls unchecked then you should save a lot of space as it is incremental forever. Further, you should use an REFS formatted volume as your repository as Veeam will use block cloning which means the weekly synthetic full will only consume the size of an incremental. (veeam warns you on this also when choosing a repository, that you should use refs) So in that scenario you could do synthetic fulls and not worry about space usage.

But yeah the same logic applies on physical backups from Veeam agent. Retention can not delete one of your synthetic fulls without it meaning all the following incrementals (before the next synthetic full) are useless, so it must wait until the next synthetic full is taken where it can then delete the old chain. So that results in needing to keep up to something like twice the retention you specify in certain scenarios etc.

[Jason_H]

Thank you very much, that was very helpful and clearer than the documentation (at least to me). I appreciate the help and your time.