Why aren't incremental bu's being deleted?

[bertsirkin]

I'm using the Veeam agent for Windows. I have a backup job setup for my desktop computer to create a full backup every month and incrementals every day. I have the "Retention policy" set to 30 days and the full backup set to the 3rd Sunday each month. But, I now have a total of 55 backup files, including 2 full backups. The oldest files are all incremental backups.

Here are my settings (nothing is "checked" on the "Maintenance" and "Storage" tabs):


If the "Retention Policy" is set to 30 days, why aren't old backups being deleted (the oldest backup is an incremental from Sept 28 - today is Nov 20)?

thanks,
Bert

[haslund]

When you specify a retention policy of 30 days, it means there must be an active chain with at least 30 days of restore points before any inactive chain can be deleted. In your case, I think the settings of the job can be optimised. For example, because you are doing active fulls once a month, then 29 days must pass before any of the "older" backup data can be deleted. I suspect a weekly active full or even better synthetic full would be best.

Note: I don't know anything about your setup and synthetic fulls could take a very long time. If you share some more details on your backup storage and set up in general it could be possible to provide a better answer.

Please see the following KB article: https://www.veeam.com/kb1990 for more details.

[bertsirkin]

Thanks, Haslund.

Here's a JPG of my backup folder: https://pbworkshops.com/downloads/VeeamBackupFolder.jpg
Hopefully that will give you an idea of what I have.

Since my oldest full backup is from 2-November, maybe things will resolve themselves on 2-December and the old incrementals will get deleted.

[bertsirkin]

It's still no working as expected. I have another computer that I just realized has a full backup dating back 71 days. It has a retention period of 30 days. Based on your comment: "When you specify a retention policy of 30 days, it means there must be an active chain with at least 30 days of restore points before any inactive chain can be deleted.", two of the full backups and associated incremental backups should have been deleted by now.

Here's what backup files exist now:

6-Nov-26-Nov Incremental Backups
5-Nov Full Backup
2-Oct-4-Nov Incremental Backups
1-Oct Full Backup
17-Sept-30 Sept Incremental Backups
16-Sept Full Backup

Here is the summary of the backup:

Source -------------------------------------------
Backup mode: entire computer
The entire computer will be backed up

Destination --------------------------------------
Local folder: E:\Veeam\
Keep restore points for the last 30 days
Compression level: Optimal (recommended)
Storage optimization: 1MB (recommended)
Storage encryption: disabled
GFS: disabled

Guest processing ---------------------------------
Application-aware processing: [disabled]
Guest file system indexing: [disabled]
Script processing: [disabled]

Schedule -----------------------------------------
Schedule: server
Daily at [11:00 PM]
Retry failed job 3 times
Wait before each retry attempt for: 10 minutes
Create active full backups monthly on the first Sunday of January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December