repository: folders with future year-stamps

[Peejay62]

Hi,

For a certain onedrive backup I observe on the repository various folders with a yearnumber in the future (2062,2074 and 2105). I ran this job for the first time with item level retention for 1 month. I expect to see only a folder 2023 containing the corresponding backupdb data in it (worth 1 month retention). Where do these folders come from? Are there files with timestamps in the future and are these being backed up? Unfortunately I cannot look into the onedrives to see if there is something wrong. Can this behaviour result in problems or errors for a job? I have another job that is causing headache (running forever) and I see that the corresponding repository has folders with years 2024 and up until 2107 while it only has a item level retention of 3 years. Any suggestions?

[Polina]

Hi Peter,

These folders 'from the future' come from Microsoft. Files that you are backing up have timestamps in the future and a backup job simply preserves them. We see such cases from time to time. This shouldn't impact backup performance in any way, and if you have a long-running job there's most likely some other reason for that (throttling is the most common).

[Peejay62]

Ok thanks, that's clear. But as an additional question then: how does this future date impacts item level retention? for example, I specifically want a retention of 1 month. I backup today. in one month the items will be deleted but what about the items that have a date in the future, when will they be discarded?

[Polina]

They will go by retention according to their modification date, which means they will remain in the repository longer.