Getting rid of full backups in a chain?

[Dave-Departed]

Hi All,

We have a VM which is being backed up (currently has 180 restore points available, which is the max based on the retention policy of its associated job), and was, until recently, using the incremental backup method, with the job set to perform a synthetic full every Saturday (which is default behaviour, I think?). The issue is now that I have switched it to reverse incrementals, because we want to send it offsite to Amazon S3 using Veeam Cloud Backup (but filter it so that only .vbk and .vbm files are uploaded, giving us a full backup from the previous day - We do this to tape already with a number of other VMs, which works well), I have noticed that there are obviously 6 months-worth of synthetic fulls on our backup repository for this VM, totalling about 7.5TB! Our repository is getting full, and I am wondering if there is any way I can somehow transform all of these synthetic fulls into increments, thus reducing the size greatly? If not, is there any other solution, please?

Thanks in advance.

Dave

[foggy]

Dave, there's no way to transform these previous fulls into rollbacks. If you need to have 6 months-worth of restore points available, you have to wait until they finally fall out according to retention.

[Dave-Departed]

Thanks foggy, I feared as much.

It's not all bad after all, as the VM in question is an Exchange 2010 DAG member, one of a pair. Both are backed up by Veeam,the other DAG VM is also using reverse incremental mode, and does not have the weekly synthetic fulls enabled, yet still holds 180 restore points. I have just tested, and restoring at the item level using Exchange AIR is successful from the earliest restore point, so we know that we can get back items from that far back if necessary.

So I will disable the synthetic full tickbox on the job of the original DAG VM in question, and remove enough restore points from the backup chain to free up our required amount of disk space (is there a preferred way to do this, rather than just deleting the files themselves?), and that should solve our issue for now - The backup chain can carry on until we are ready to migrate to Exchange Online!

[veremin]

Is there a preferred way to do this, rather than just deleting the files themselves?

You can lower retention policy in accordance to your needs and initiate job run. The restore points falling out of new retention will be deleted. Thanks.