Forever Forward Disk Space Query

[FTL]

Morning

Do i understand this correctly please?

In a FF backup scenario, once the retention period is met it merges that incremental into the full backup and then deletes that incremental from the drive.

Does this full backup then just continue to infinitly grow with every inremental thats added in?

In which case how the hell do i control the disk space as surely the full backup will just end up astronimically big?

Or am i missing something?

Thanks

[Virtuollie]

You can schedule maintenance on your full backup file in the backup (copy) job, found under "Storage" -> "Advanced" and the tab maintenance.
This will tidy up your full backup file, keeping it consistent and in manageable size.

[foggy]

This or using GFS retention. Also, keep in mind that unless you're using a dedupe target, blocks storing deleted data can be further reused upon merge.

[FTL]

what does the maintenace do - does it remove the data thats been commited to the full backup file thats older than the retention period?

I have a job thats setup as FF incremental and it keeps 7 restore points, however over time its grown and grown as there is 50GB incremental changes every night to the point where im now running low on disk space.

Will it remove anything older than 7 days out the full file?

I misread the documentation when i set the job up a few months ago and thought it commits the oldest incremental to the full, then deletes that incremetal file from disk and also removes anything older than my 7 days policy from the full.

Main repo is a NAS box, with the veaam server connected as an iscsi target - formatted in Windows as Refs

[foggy]

Not exactly. It basically recreates the full backup file from scratch by copying only the needed blocks and getting rid of fragmentation. Note that you need enough space for the new full to perform that.

[FTL]

Thanks Foggy

If i need enough space to temp recreate the Full backup to defrag them im not much better off than going with7 day Forward Incremental with a Synthetic full once a week?

[foggy]

Yes, synthetic full also requires a similar amount of space.