Backup scheduling headaches

[silentcreek]

Hi,

I've been using Veeam Endpoint Backup Free pretty much since it came out on a Windows 7 computer to backup my system partition . It basically was a set-and-forget thing.

A few weeks ago I installed Windows 10 on that computer (clean install, not an upgrade) and also reinstalled Veem Endpoint Backup Free 1.5. However, this time I can't figure out how to set the backup schedule and the retention policy to do what I want. I want to run the backup on Sundays every 4 weeks (or once a month) and keep just the last 2 or 3 backups. On the Windows 7 computer I somehow managed to do that, but I don't remember how exactly. Please note that I use this only for system partition images. My personal data is backed up seperately and more frequently by a custom robocopy script.

Here's what I configured:
1) Keep the last 2 backup days
Well, this doesn't seem to work. At the moment I have 5 backups (1 full and 4 incremental) in my destination and I don't understand why. Please note that I didn't run manual backup jobs in the meantime, these are all automatic backups.

2) Backup daily on these weekdays (Sunday) at 7pm and backup no more often than every 28 days
I was hoping this would make my backup run every 4 weeks only. But it runs every week on Sunday, so the "no more often than every 28 days" rule seems to be ignored.

Maybe I used an older version of Veeam Endpoint Backup Free on Windows 7 that behaved differently - or maybe I'm just too blind to figure out the obvious.
But how can I schedule my backup to run only every 4 weeks or once in a month and keep only the last 2 or 3 images?

Thank you!

Timo

[Dima P.]

Hi Timo,

At the moment I have 5 backups (1 full and 4 incremental)

Check the date of the said restore points (via windows explorer or via File Level Recovery). Maybe you have more that one incremental job run per day? Veeam Endpoint Backup retains restore points for the last N days; the number of days is defined by the user.

"no more often than every 28 days" rule seems to be ignored.

True. Daily schedule ignores this option - do you have any other backup events checked?

[silentcreek]

Check the date of the said restore points (via windows explorer or via File Level Recovery). Maybe you have more that one incremental job run per day? Veeam Endpoint Backup retains restore points for the last N days; the number of days is defined by the user.

These were all taken on Sundays, one per day at the set time. However, I seem to have solved it now. After starting this topic, I decided to delete my backup target entirely and setup the backup configuration from scratch. For testing purposes I ran the backup once per day and after the last run I saw that the first and second backup hae been merged. So at least this seems to work now.

True. Daily schedule ignores this option - do you have any other backup events checked?

No, I only have the daily backup set, no additional conditions like when the drive is attached or so. But if monthly is not an option in the software, I think I'll just use the command line options to start a backup and let the Windows Task Scheduler handle the scheduling instead. I still wonder, though, how I managed to do that before, since I'm sure I only used the built-in scheduling options of Veeam on my Windows 7 installation before...

Thank you!