Backup Copy Question - too many incrementals?

[ChuckS42]

We are working on a migration from an old backup product for our physical servers to the new Veeam Agent for Windows. One thing I need to replicate is our long-term retention backups - monthlies kept for a year, and yearlies kept for seven years. So, I do this with a Backup Copy job.

Here's my Backup Copy Job configuration:
Copy every day, starting at 3:00AM (the VAW jobs start at midnight).
Restore points to keep: 2 (the minimum)
Keep the following restore points for archival purposes:
Weekly - 0 (Sunday midnight)
Monthly - 12 (1st day of the month)
Quarterly - 0
Yearly - 7 (1st of January)
Read the entire restore point from source backup instead of synthesizing - checked (we use dedupe storage).

Now, ideally I only want Full backups in the copy job, but I realize that this is a square peg/round hole kind of solution, and some incrementals will get picked up. What I'm seeing, however, is that despite the setting of 2 for Restore Points to Keep, we're getting a full 30 days' worth of Incrementals in the Copy job. Is this an artifact of using the Active Full method rather than Forever Forward? Is there a change I could make to the above config that would limit the number of Incrementals that get picked up?

A few weeks ago I had a case open to answer questions on the proper configuration of this Backup Copy job, and the Veeam engineer I was chatting with seemed to think this was not expected and that I should open a case, but I wanted to run it by the forums before taking that step.

[DGrinev]

Hi Chuck,

What I'm seeing, however, is that despite the setting of 2 for Restore Points to Keep, we're getting a full 30 days' worth of Incrementals in the Copy job.

This is expected behavior since you've checked Read entire restore point the backup copy job start to use Forward incremental method instead of Forever forward this is why you are getting 30 days of increments.


Thanks!

[ChuckS42]

Ok, thanks.

Would it be possible to redesign the Backup Copy Job to give the option of only creating/copying Full backups? Or perhaps the ability to schedule the interval to be a specific day of the month (since all I'm using this function for is for archive backups.)

[JaySt]

Concept of intervals etc keeps confusing me as well, especially to figure out what to expect to be held on disk.
V10 will be simpler if i understand correctly...

You could think about larger interval or keeping 1 weekly perhaps. This would reduce the copy job chain size. Should not matter that much with dedupe storage regarding capacity usage

[DGrinev]

Hi Chuck,

In the current version of the product there is no way to set up the scenario you are asking for.
As we already discussed with you in the other topic you can set shorter retention and long interval. Thanks!