Question about retention and oldest restore date

[Beheer]

Hello,

We have set up Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 a few years ago for the services Sharepoint online and Onedrive for business.
We have one job that runs every Friday.
We have one repository with Retention policy 5 years, Item-level retention.
The backup server and Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 were configured in September 2019.
Recently I noticed that the repository disk was almost full (can't find a way to get notified about that like in Veeam B&R).

So I was wondering about storage usage. Last year I made a screenshot of Treesize with the backup folder and year-subfolders. Last year there was a 2016 folder, now that folder is gone, which makes sense.
But last year the 2017 folder was 225 MB, now it is 524 MB.
With 5 year retention and 2022 almost over, I would expect the 2017 folder to contain less data that a year ago.
How does that work?

I tried to find what data is in an old point-in-time to see how far I could go back.
So Explore, Explore sharepoint, select Use the following point-in-time, then go back years, select a month, a.s.o. It pointed out that with eighter sharepoint or onedrive, the oldest backup date I could select was in December 2019, all older months have crosses on all days of the month.
Why can't I select a date older dat than September 2019 when retention is set to 5 years and year folders from 2017 till 2022 exist? Do I have a 3 year retention configured somewhere?

I have done some searching and reading, but so far I couldn't get explained how retention works and how restore back in time works in such a way that it makes sense that I cant go back more that 3 years.

Regards,
Han

[Mildur]

Hi Han

But last year the 2017 folder was 225 MB, now it is 524 MB.
With 5 year retention and 2022 almost over, I would expect the 2017 folder to contain less data that a year ago.
How does that work?

Maybe your users have moved some items to another folder. In that case, the data will be protected again and the ADB file will grow. There is no deduplication between different folders for the same item.

Why can't I select a date older dat than September 2019 when retention is set to 5 years and year folders from 2017 till 2022 exist? Do I have a 3 year retention configured somewhere?

The "Specify point in time" step in the restore wizard will show you the days you have a restore point (successful backup run). When you choose the restore point from 3 years ago you should still see older items than these 3 years.

Thanks
Fabian

[Beheer]

Thanks for the reply Fabian.