Retention policy but different number of restore points

[FireBIade]

I have a 64TB server backing up to an 80TB NAS. The retention period was initially set to 14 days but I'm running out of space now. When I look at the disk I have 27 restore points. I would have thought this would stay roughly around the 14 mark but it's 27. To remove the old files do I need to turn on the "remove deleted items data after"? The backup is currently set to create synthetic full backups.

[Mildur]

Hi David

If you have configured to keep 14 restore points and you are doing daily backups with weekly synthetic fulls, you should have between 14 and 21 restore points on the disk. This is how retention for forward incremental works.

Was there a weekend where the synthetic full wasn‘t running? Without a synthetic full each weekend, it could happen that a single chain is not 1 full and 6 increments. When the synthetic full is created only each second weekend, the chain will be 1 full and 11-12 increments. This could lead to the 27 restore points you are seeing now.

If you want to be sure, you can open a support case. Veeam support will be able to confirm if everything is working as expected with your retention policy.

[FireBIade]

Thanks for the reply, that makes sense, and yes it's likely that at some point a failure occurred which has caused this. If I edit the backup job to be 7 days and set a backup going do you think it will sort itself out given that I only have about 5TB space left e.g will it delete old stuff before trying to fit new stuff on or am I better off clearing the whole lot down and starting it fresh?

[Mildur]

Your welcome.
You can set the retention to 7 days. At the end of the next backup job veeam will remove the aged out backup files as configured in the retention settings. That could help to remove an older backup chain. But only if no full or incremental backups are in the configured retention period (7 days).

Or you can manually remove the oldest backup chain from the backup repository, do a rescan of the backup repo and remove the deleted restore points from the database.