Full backups in Backup Copy Job with GFS

[SamiE]

Hi,

With the new GFS in v11 the Copy Job doesn't create full backup with the retention period (marked with R).

Example:
Periodic copy every 1 days
Copy Job retention policy 2 restore points
GFS: keep weekly full backups for 3 weeks. Use bu from Monday.

This job will create the full on Monday and mark it with W but on rest of the days it will create only increments and won't create the full marked with R to keep only 2 restore points.

This will be more apparent if the job has 2 restore point retention policy and GFS has keep monthly. Then the job will do daily increments for the whole month until the GFS rule makes a new full.

The old (pre v11) kept the full marked with R and didn't use GFS fulls as base for the increments.

[Dima P.]

Hello Sami,

Yes that's correct. Backup copy job no longer needs extra full backup, instead we link incrementals to the GFS full backups whenever possible. The only drawback is merge process - we cannot merge incrementals into full backup whenever its marked as GFS restore point, so extra incrementals will be created in-between GFS backups. Thanks!

[SamiE]

So I can't create a Copy Job with 30 daily increments and keep a yearly full from January because I would end up with 364 increments.
Or 14 daily increment with monthly full because I would end up with ~30 increments.

Other words the Copy Job retention policy has no effect if GFS is set up.

[foggy]

That's correct. And actually, the old GFS mechanism behaved similarly in the case of active full GFS.