Best way to "gracefully" decommission an old job?

[cparker4486]

I have three Backup jobs: Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3. These are based on folders (of the same names) in vCenter. Originally I created different jobs for each folder because of prior storage limitations and the need to keep a shorter chain on Tier 2 and Tier 3 than on Tier 1. For a long time now I've not had this storage limitation and my jobs have been functionally identical. What I'd like to do is create a new job (or use my existing Tier 1 job) that backs up all data to take advantage of dedup and a simpler backup setup.

The problem I will be left with, whether I augment the existing Tier 1 job or create a completely new one, is that the restore points will need to be manually deleted from the old jobs, one at a time on a daily basis. I'd much rather have each job perform this task on its own until it is left with just one restore point (the VBK) or an empty set of restore points that I can delete all at once.

The only two ways I've come up with to do this are (1) to remove the backup folder from each job (so that it no longer had anything to backup) and prevent the job from purging removed VMs or (2) create a PowerShell script that deletes the oldest VRB on a daily basis.

I'd prefer it if B&R handled this itself because that way it would be doing things properly.

What's the recommended way to do this?

[Shestakov]

Hello Chris,

If I understand correctly you want to combine 3 jobs into one. but want to keep existing restore points until you have a chain of new ones.

To do this, you can add VMs from jobs Tier 2 and Tier 3 and set the desired retention policy. As for deleting restore points of those 2 jobs, I would use PowerShell script to delete the oldest backup in the chain daily, assuming you used reversed incremental backup method (otherwise it`s useless).

Thank you.

[cparker4486]

I would use PowerShell script to delete the oldest backup in the chain daily, assuming you used reversed incremental backup method (otherwise it`s useless).

That's right, I did use Reverse Incremental. But now that you mention it, doing what I'm looking for, natively within B&R, seems even more valuable for Forward Incremental jobs.

Suppose I have a FI (or FI-Forever) job with 30 restore points (one VBK and 29 VRBs) and I need to create a new job (for any reason.) I'd be stuck with all those files unless I could force the VBK to be "caught up" to a certain point in that chain. In other words, if I had 30 restore points (for an FI/FI-Forever job) but wanted to generate a VBK based on the newest data, would I be able to do it?

[Shestakov]

Yes, in this case, you can make Synthetic Full backup and with "Transform previous backup chains into rollback" option enabled.