Changing Retention

[stigger]

OK Question.

I have a backup job with a 7-day retention, and an archival retention of 4 weeks and 12 months. I need to clear some space so I want to take a subset of those to only have a 7-day retention and no archive.

If I create a new job with just a 7-day retention and move those machines into it, what happens to the backups from the other job?
Are they deleted?
Are they considered part of the new jobs backups and purge out at 7 days old?
Or something else?

I'm from a unixy Networker background so I know how backups work, just not the specifics of Veeam.

[Natalia Lupacheva]

Hi Jeff,

If you create a new job, the "old" one will still work as configured. Scheduled backups will still run and retention policy will still work as configured.
It does not matter how many jobs you configure to protect the same VM - the new job will not stop/delete/change the old ones.

Thanks!

[foggy]

Hi Jeff, I believe you're going to remove the VMs from the original job, right? VMs that are not being backed up by the job for whatever reason are subject to a deleted VMs retention. Provided the per-VM backups chains are enabled, the corresponding backups will be deleted after the number of days specified there.

[stigger]

OK So how do I manually remove, some backup files.

If I set a 7day deletion to preserve what I have until the new saves are in place with just a 7-day retention.

How do I delete the older fulls now? Is there something I have missed to delete saves I don't want any more?

[stigger]

Apologies I've also noticed that my copy folder is approx twice as big as the backup folder that holds the actual backups locally. it also contains approximately twice as many objects.

[foggy]

If you have per-VM chains setting enabled on the repository, they should be deleted automatically, according to deleted VMs retention. If you want, you can delete them manually but that is a not recommended approach.

[stigger]

OK Perhaps I'm using the wrong terminology. I have a machine with 8 restore points/backups.

4 incremental and 4 full. The incrementals are from the most recent full. How do I go about removing the oldest 3 fulls as I don't want them any more.

[veremin]

You can shorten the retention to 4 and let the job remove previous restore full automatically. If you do not have space for new restore point, you can delete 3 obsolete full backups manually without any issues. Thanks!

[stigger]

When you say manually do you mean just delete them from Explorer?

[foggy]

Either that or via Veeam B&R console - see the link above. This way you will also clean up the database, which is a good thing.

[stigger]

Cheers