Backup Retention Period

[patrickwilson82]

Hi there,

I have my Veeam program configured to only keep backups for 7 days. They are being backed up to my NAS, but I still have ones on there that are older than 7 days. Any idea as to why? Thanks.

[DGrinev]

Hi Patrick,

Please can you share the schedule for the job, since if it's not daily, then the backup retention counts only the days when the computer was turned on and backed up. Thanks!

[patrickwilson82]

It is set to back up daily at 12:30AM.

[DGrinev]

I assume you've enabled Create active full backups periodically, so every new active full starts the new, independent backup chain.
In this case retention will be applied only when newly created backup chain will reach 7 restore points. Thanks!

[patrickwilson82]

Yes, I have set it to create a full backup every Sunday. So if I'm understanding correctly, once a new full backup happens, all backups from before the previous Sunday full backup will be erased?

[DGrinev]

In your scenario with the retention set to 7 and daily backups you will get:
week 1: 1 full backup (Sunday of week 0) + 6 increments.
week 2: 1 full backup (Sunday of week 1) + 6 increments.
So, the backup chain of week 1 will be deleted only when the agent delivers the full backup on the Sunday of week 2.

[patrickwilson82]

Thank you. That answers my question.

[patrickwilson82]

I don't really want anything older than 7 days, as I have a limited amount of disk space. Is there a way to set this so that at each full backup it deletes the previous full backup and anything from before it?

[DGrinev]

Hi Patrick,

You can set retention to keep 2 RPs with weekly active full, in this case the length of the backup chain will not exceed 8 restore points.
Every 9th restore point will trigger deletion of the previous backup chain. Thanks!

[Dima P.]

I don't really want anything older than 7 days, as I have a limited amount of disk space. Is there a way to set this so that at each full backup it deletes the previous full backup and anything from before it?

Instead of periodic active full you could use forever incremental mode with retention set to 7 days. In such case you will have restore points for past 7 days on your repository.