Retention question...

[mobamoba]

I feel kind of dumb posting this but have read through the forums and online manual and cannot figure out how to get Veeam Agent for Windows to do the retention policy I want. I would like Veeam to do the following:
Week 1 - 1 full, 6 incrementals (7 backups total)
Week 2 - same - 1 full, 6 incrementals (14 backups total)
Week 3 - same - 1 full, 6 incrementals (21 backups total)
Day 22 - delete all of Week 1 backups, keep Weeks 2 and 3, 1 full (15 backups total)

I've tried everything I could think of but can't figure out how to do what in my mind seems so simple so any help would be appreciated - thanks!

[Dima P.]

Hello mobamoba,

You need to configure periodic full backup for the start of the week, and set retention to 21 day. Cheers!

[mobamoba]

I am still finding the retention policy to be completely baffling honestly. I set it for a full backup every Monday and a 14 day retention period. To my mind, this means on the third Monday (i.e. Day 15), Veeam should delete the first Full and, because they're useless without the Full, 6 incrementals and start a new Full.

But it seems what Veeam is doing is waiting for the last incremental to fall out of the retention period before deleting the set. Is that what's happening? I find it really confusing because the Job Setting explicitly asks you how many days you want to keep a backup and then seems to completely ignore it. It seems to me if I say "14 days" then no backup should be older than 14 days regardless of whether it's a Full or Incremental; alternatively, if it's waiting for 14 days after the last incremental in the set then I think it should state that, e.g. "Keep backups for X days; if you are using Periodic Full Backups, backups will be deleted X days after the last incremental in the set and NOT X days after the Full" or something like that.

In case you're wondering , the reason the drive space issue is so critical for me is that I backup to an SD Card for a laptop (and Robocopy it to a real hard drive on my LAN) because, as I learned the hard way, if the worst happens and I have to do a BMR, the Internet when traveling is way too slow to restore a few hundred Gigs of data. Because it's an SD, I don't do Forever Incrementals because the merging is really slow (plus all the disk writes isn't great for SDs but that's not my main concern) and thus rely on Full Backups plus incrementals for my data and keep running out of space because I can't figure out the retention. Thanks.

[Natalia Lupacheva]

Hello,

Please check this animated kb to get more information about the retention policy. It helps to understand how it works.

no backup should be older than 14 days regardless of whether it's a Full or Incremental;

We cannot do this, because you can have an old chain (full + several incrementals). In this case, if we just delete the "oldest" backup, the corresponding incrementals become useless. We won't delete the full backup and leave incrementals that belong to it.

Thank you!

[mobamoba]

Well perhaps it's a phrasing issue and in a future Agent update, the Job Settings could read, "Keep backups for X days from the date of the last incremental in a backup set" - at least then the user would understand how the timing is calculated. Thanks.

[Dima P.]

mobamoba,

Thanks for the feedback, we will discuss it with the team. Cheers!