Backup job stopped removing old backups after v9 upgrade

[danielchung]

After upgrade from v8 to v9 and update 1, everything works fine except backup jobs stopped removing old backup according to the retention policy. Only some backup jobs are affected. The jobs were set to have 25 restore points, incremental backup and synthetic full on Friday with transforming previous backup chains into rollbacks.

In the job statistics, I noticed that since the v9 upgrade, the task of "removing xxxx.vrb per retention policy" no longer exists, and the number of existing restore points has accumulated to 36.

I didn't try recreating backup job but instead changing the number of restore points to keep to 24 or 26, to see if it would "update/reset" the related setting but no luck.

Case logged - 01765350

[foggy]

Daniel, are synthetic fulls actually performed according to the schedule (with subsequent chain transformation to rollbacks)? What backup files do you see on the repository in the current forward incremental chain(since the last full backup)?

[danielchung]

Yes, the synthetic full was created successfully. Now, there is a full backup (synthetic full on last Friday), one incremental and 34 reverse incremental backups. Normally, the oldest reverse incremental backup will be deleted almost the end of the job but now it just did nothing for retention.

Today I tried to recreate a backup job with all the same settings but still no luck.

[veremin]

Then, we have to say that the described behaviour does not look expected, as the oldest reverse increments falling out of retention period should have been already deleted. Kindly, keep working with our support engineer on finding out the root cause. Thanks.

[danielchung]

The support helped fix it and it was an issue in DB that the full backup hasn't been marked as "head" of the backup chain. Probably something went wrong during DB upgrade from v8 to v9.

The support guy run below SQL statement for each affect job:

Code: Select all

select * from dbo.[Backup.Model.Points] where backup_id = 'backup ID of the affected job'
order by creation_time desc

update dbo.[Backup.Model.Points] set link_id = NULL, alg=0 where id='unique id of the full backup in the backup chain'