Age out monthly full backups

[Bharathy]

Hi,

I have old backup jobs with Monthly restore points with retention policy of 11 restore points (Typically 11 months). Now the VMs in the job are moved or decommissioned. I would want to make the monthly restore points age out by itself without manually deleting the restore point every month from Backups section.

Age out should happen one by one every month. Any idea? Thanks!

[HannesK]

Hello,
as restore points are configured instead of days / months, the software has no chance to know when it should delete data. With GFS (sounds like you don't have that and run a backup job once per month), there would be a way. But it looks like manual deletion would be the way to go. One could also reduce the number of points every month, but not sure whether this makes anyone happy.

Best regards,
Hannes

[Bharathy]

Thanks Hannes!

Will mentioning the months in days will help? Like 11 months -> 335 days in the retention policy?

Will the monthly restore points age out by mentioning 335 days?

[HannesK]

Hello,
not really... in V11 only GFS backups get the retention applied in orphaned backups. GFS flags get applied during backup. As it sounds like you have no GFS, my answer from above applies.

Best regards,
Hannes

[Bharathy]

Hi Hannes,

The Backups are still not orphaned. I still have the backup jobs on the Veeam. VMs were moved to another job due to re-organisation of the jobs.

For Daily restore points to age-out, I run the powershell script to remove all VM objects from the jobs and keep the job empty. The empty job is scheduled to run everyday. So the restore points ageout by itself. And Veeam takes care of removal and updating DB. This works fine.

But, I would like to know will the same work for Monthly restore points. If the retention policy of the job is set to '11 months -> 335 days'. So the monthly restore points age out by itself?

[HannesK]

Hello,
ah yes, if you have the empty job working and no orphaned backups, then it will also delete the monthly backups over time.

Best regards,
Hannes

[Bharathy]

Thanks Hannes. I emptied the jobs and made it to age out.