Only want 14 days of backups

[GarionB]

Hello everyone,
We recently just purchased VB&R 7 and I have a simple question for you I hope. What is the best way for me to guarantee that I ONLY have 14 days of backups kept on disk? Currently I have 14 "restore points" configured to keep on disk. I am using Incremental with synthetic fulls on Saturday schedule. In addition, I am doing Active Fulls on First of the month. I want to ensure that I do not overrun my disk repositories and also want to ensure I don't have stale data kept on disk that I don't care about. Again, my goal is to ONLY keep 14 days worth of backups. Your help is greatly appreciated, thanks!

Garion

[veremin]

If you want to keep exact number of restore point, then, you should switch to reversed incremental mode. With forward incremental mode the number of restore points kept by backup job will always vary. Thanks.

[dellock6]

And from a scheduling perspective, VBR uses restore points count, not the age of the backups. To respects expiration of backups based on age, you need to count both the required number of restore points AND the schedule frequency. 14 restore points equal to 14 days only if you schedule daily backups "and" you don't run manually the same backup job. Otherwise, retention points need to be adjusted.

Luca.

[GarionB]

If you want to keep exact number of restore point, then, you should switch to reversed incremental mode. With forward incremental mode the number of restore points kept by backup job will always vary. Thanks.

Thank you for your reply...why do the restore points vary so much with fwd incrementals? Also, is your recommendation still valid when used in conjunction with dedupe appliances like mine; ie Data Domain?

[dellock6]

Because the weekly chain is made of a full and its incremental, you can write them down like: F i i i i i i.
Even when the F file is expired, we need to keep it around until the last i file is expired too, otherwise the incremental file without its own full is unusable. Thus, in a simple weekly full rotation, you end up having in reality one more week saved into the repository.

Luca.

[GarionB]

Luca...thank you, this is crystal clear to me now. I really appreciate the help!