Forever incremental merge after deleting VMs

[mephisto]

Hi there,

After a VM has been deleted from a backup job and the retention period expires, what happens with the full backup file? Does the full backup file shrink?

I'm wondering what will happen when I delete a VM and run an incremental. I assume the next incremental will be smaller as the VM is not included, but the full backup will keep the old VM until retention expires, and then after it expires, what happens?

[foggy]

There's a deleted VMs retention period setting that handles the behavior of the VBK file blocks belonging to removed VMs. Basically, the behavior is the same as for reverse incremental mode: after the specified amount of days, blocks belonging to the deleted VMs in VBK are marked as free and then can be re-used by the new data. To reclaim the space, you need to perform an active full.

[mephisto]

Thanks for your reply