Full Backup Chains and Rollbacks

[lewisdrummond]

I have a backup job with the following settings:
- Incremental: 'Enable Synthetic Fulls' checked (on Saturdays), 'Transform previous full backup chains into rollbackups' checked
- Restore points to keep on disk: 70
- Schedule: periodically every 3 hours (during six different windows) - effectively running 6 times a day

The job takes 30 mins to run nomally, and 12 hours each Saturday for the transformations. With the above schedule, I should get 7x 6 = 42 backups a week. Given the transformation takes so long, I miss three backup windows and get 39 backups a week.

Problem: I'm looking to have 70 restore points, with one full backup and rollbacks spanning more than a week. However, each Saturday during the transformation all incrementals for the last week are converted to rollbacks, but all rollbacks from the week before are deleted. Does this make sense, and can it be avoided?

I barely have enough room for two full backups, and even then, one can only choose between having a periodic full on a monthly or weekly basis...

[Gostev]

Hi Lewis, are you saying Veeam keeps less restore points than required according to your retention policy (70)?

[lewisdrummond]

That is correct. Veeam is keeping exactly one week's worth of restore points (amounting to 39), and not 70... I don't know whether this is because of the limitations of rollbacks and weekly transformations...

[Gostev]

What version/build number are you using?

[lewisdrummond]

5.0.2.224 Enterprise

[Gostev]

See rule #1 of posting technical issues seriously though, please upgrade to the latest version - this will resolve your issue. Thanks.

[lewisdrummond]

Ok - I'm a very small build version behind the latest one. Can you answer my general enquiry though? As a concept, can you have:

- single full backup (created on a weekly basis) with incrementals
- 10 days worth of rollbacks

[Gostev]

Oh, absolutely. This is exactly the use case this feature was designed for - to allow you keeping only 1 full backup on disk, and yet virtually unlimited amount of earlier restore points aka rollbacks. You are by far not alone with the "storage problem", many customers do not have a disk space to keep more than 1 full backup with image-level backups, yet they still want to keep significant amount of restore points on disk. We have guessed that this is going to be the issue for many back at the drawing board stage of development (reversed incremental backup was available with the very first release of our product).

Yes, very small difference between build numbers, but it happens that 224 has a bug that causes older backups to be deleted

Thanks.

[lewisdrummond]

Ah - I will install the new version now. By the way, I still need free space amounting to the next full backup, because the new full backup is created before the old synthetic is deleted. correct?

[Gostev]

No, existing full backup is in-place modified (in the transactional manner), so you do not need space free space amounting additional full backup.

[lewisdrummond]

Thank you - very helpful. Will see shortly if 5.0.2.230 helped!

[lewisdrummond]

Looks like we're good!

[Gostev]

Thanks for the update!