Enforce Retention Policy at Beginning of Job?

[brupnick]

I was wondering if it's possible (registry key?) to enforce the retention policy at the beginning of a backup job rather than at the end. In my case, I'm doing traditional incrementals and usually keep two sets of fulls and incrementals on disk. However, when I'm ready to create full #3, I need to delete full #1 and its incrementals to make room for the new full. Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[tsightler]

If it was enforced prior to the job it technically wouldn't change since deleting the old backup would violate the defined policy.

I have two suggestions,

1. Simply reduce the retention requirements so that full #1 and it's increments are deleted on the last incremental run prior the the full #3 run. That would mean that on the last day prior to running Full #3 you would only have restore points for Full #2 and it's incrementals.

2. Create and schedule a Powershell script that purges the older backups immediately prior to the Full #3 backup. For example, if Full #3 is run at 6PM on Saturday, a simple script to purge Full #1 at 5:55PM on Saturday should do the trick.

[brupnick]

Thanks Tom. I do like the first option, but this number could vary since I do my full backups on the first Friday/Saturday of the month. I will explore this further to see if there's a way that I can get it to work for me.

The way I'm currently handling this is to manually delete the oldest .vbk and all the associated .vib files. Is this acceptable from a VBR perspective? By doing it this way, is VBR able to update itself to know that I have removed X number of restore points?

[Vitaliy S.]

Is this acceptable from a VBR perspective? By doing it this way, is VBR able to update itself to know that I have removed X number of restore points?

Yes, this solution should be acceptable, though I also believe it's better to adjust your retention policy settings accordingly.

[brupnick]

Is there anything special that I need to do in VBR (a rescan or some sort) after I manually delete a backup set like that?

[Gostev]

Repository rescan should take care of updating the configuration database to reflect removed backups.