Veeam Agent weekly rotate of backup drive

[jimvman]

Hello again everybody,
I have 2 6TB NAS backup drives that I use Veeam Agent for Windows to backup to. Each full backup is about 1.5TB in size. I have the keep backups for 14 days option enabled in the Veeam agent settings. The drives are swapped weekly, and I have a Full backup performed on the day the drives are swapped. For some reason, the drives end up filling up eventually, as they are not being overwritten. Is there something I'm missing that Veeam Agent doesn't clear out old backups from the device? Every couple of months I have to manually remove old backups to make space on the NAS device.

Thanks for any help you have in this matter.

[HannesK]

Hello,
and welcome to the forums.

As I cannot find how often you run backups, I assume it has something to do with the "(excluding days with no backup)". I do almost the same like you (swap drives, 14 days, no full backups in my case, backup every few days) and I have more than 14 "days", but I have 14 "restore points".

Best regards,
Hannes

[jimvman]

Thanks for the reply Hannes,
Wouldn't you want to run a full backup every time you're swapping drives? You won't have the proper Full with incremental backup stored on the device if you don't, specifically if you needed to do a full restore of the OS.
I'll look at the option for excluding days with no backup. But I still think Veeam should clean out the backup data that's older than 14 days, right? It does not do that.

Thanks.

[HannesK]

Hello,
hmm, not sure what you mean with the full backup. Every incremental backup is a logical full backup.

I swap drive since many years and I never wished to have a new full backup as it has no benefits from my point of view.

It would only clean, if there are still 14 restore points left. No matter how old they are. Imagine you had 7 days configured. The machine was turned off for two weeks because I was on vacation. If it would delete everything older than 7 days, I would be sad

Best regards,
Hannes

[TheZigPC]

What we end up doing is taking a page out of the old Symantec/Veritas image-based systems.
We backup to a static drive (call it a permanent drive), this drive is usually a large internal disk.
After the backup is performed, we have a robocopy script that looks for any external drive with the word “OFFSITE” in its name, it then copies or ‘syncs’ the permanent drive with that connected offsite drive. We cycle “offsite” drives daily. We have written scripts to write successful syncs to the event log and errors if any failures (offsite not connected, cant copy a file, etc). Its all controlled with a nice powershell script. We even have provisions for using a NAS as a "permanent" drive.

[jimvman]

Hi Hannes,
Thanks for the reply.
When you say "every incremental backup is a logical full backup" That is only true if you have an initial full backup. So as long as you have the initial full backup, any incremental backup after that will handle the changes from the initial full backup. You're suggesting, just leave it do incremental forever, and as long as you have the initial full backup it will restore the changes. My only issue is that I swap drives every week. So what is the incremental comparing against? If I have 2 different full backups on each drive. What I wanted to do, is re-run a full backup every time I swap the device, then let incremental backups run for the remainder of the week. Then swap drives, then do another full, and repeat.

[HannesK]

Hello,
yes, incremental forever only works with one full + depending increments (no matter which product)

My only issue is that I swap drives every week

Which issue did you see when you did that? I do that since years without any issue

So what is the incremental comparing against?

against the full on the disk that is connected "right now".

If you want a full with every swap, then this requires scripting or manual intervention. I still see no use-case for it (it just costs time and disk space), but if you really want it, then you need to trigger a full on your own.

Best regards,
Hannes

[jimvman]

OK so it makes more sense to have incremental forever setup.
For security reasons (drive failure or something), and to avoid only having a single Full backup on 1 device, would it make sense to have a Full backup on each device? Should I copy the Full backup from the 1 backup device to the other, then just swap them? I would think I would need the identical Full backup on each device, right? Or does the incremental compare against the 1 Full backup you have on each device?

Thanks again, and sorry for the late reply.

[HannesK]

would it make sense to have a Full backup on each device?

sure - but that will happen automatically. no way to configure that.

No worries - once you start using the product, things should become clearer