Increm > Transform previous full bkup ...

[flavor4real]

Hello,
How is everyone?... my question and please correct me if i'm wrong.

If I have the last 3 weeks, which includes 3 Sythetic Backups and 21 days of increm.
If I then chose TRANSFORM PREVIOUS FULL BACKUPS CHAINS INTO ROLLBACKS then It will result to ONCE Full Backup and keep a amount of Increm. in accordance to the redention policy I've set....

I hope I did understand that right ..

[Vitaliy S.]

Dennis,

Let me show an example, that should you help to understand the logic behind this scenario. Imagine that we have 2 VBK files with 3 VIBs in both chains:

VBK vib vib vib VBK vib vib vib

When transform is performed, it transforms a previous VBK chain only, so you'll have:

(VBK vib vib vib) > vrb vrb vrb vrb T.VBK vib vib vib

Provided that you have a 7 days retention policy, the following will stay on disk:

vrb vrb vrb T.VBK vib vib vib

Hope it helps!

[flavor4real]

I think I get that. I have a questions bout Restore Points to keep on disk.

I run a Job Mon-Fri, every 6 hrs (4 times a day), full sythetic on friday, the restore points to keep on disk is 14. So I go and review under Backup and Replication > Backups, the Job and the Restore Points listed, a see a count of 31 Restore Point for each server. Here is what I'm getting confused.

If I set the Restore Points to Keep to 14 under the backup job properties, why do I see a Restore Points Total of 31 for each server under Backups (specific job properties)?

I believe that this is why I run out of space. Whoever set these jobs up did a few miscalculations and I'm here to clean it.

------------------
If I would want one week of Backups. How would the retention policy have to look like with the information given above?

thanks for your help

[Vitaliy S.]

If you use 14 days retention policy with 4 times a day backup job schedule, then you should have this:

5 days * 4 runs = 20 restore points + 1 Synthetic Full (21 restore points)

Please note that retention policy WILL NOT be applied for this chain yet, as the oldest restore point to be removed is the original VBK file which cannot be removed, because every subsequent VIB depends on this VBK file.

That said, when you initate another backup chain next week, the retention policy will be applied as soon as you have 20 restore points from the next week + 14 restore points for this week. Hope it makes sense.

Should more details be required, please have a look at this topic: Restore Points and forward Incremental ?

If you want to have 1 week of backups, then you have two ways:

1. Specify 7 days of retention policy. Please note that Forward Incremental backup mode would keep 2x restore points, because of the reasons explained above.
2. Switch to Reversed Incremental backup mode and set the retention policy to 7

Thank you!