Questions about deleted VM from backup in FFI mode

[adrien.herve]

Hi guys,

I'm in forever forward incremental mode for my backups. Retention of 35 days, 1 large VBK and 34 VIBs.
Can you please tell me what's happening when I delete a VM from my backups on disk?
Every single segments belonged exclusively to this VM are directly purged in all my backup chain or I need to wait 35 more days (the complete rotation)?
If I have 35 backups of this VM in my chain do you think my VBK and VIBs files could decrease a little bit when I delete a VM from backups?

Two other questions:
- Do you think forever forward incremental mode is really forever or I need to schedule a new active or synthetic full sometimes?
- Is there any possibility to defrag a VBK?

Thanks,

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Adrien,

Can you please tell me what's happening when I delete a VM from my backups on disk?

Blocks belonging to this deleted VM will be reused by new VM data.

Every single segments belonged exclusively to this VM are directly purged in all my backup chain or I need to wait 35 more days (the complete rotation)?

The second case plus these blocks will be marked as deleted and will be replaced by new VM changes.

If I have 35 backups of this VM in my chain do you think my VBK and VIBs files could decrease a little bit when I delete a VM from backups?

No, please look through this topic for further reading > Remove clients from a backup but VBK file never shrinks.

- Do you think forever forward incremental mode is really forever or I need to schedule a new active or synthetic full sometimes?

Yes, there is no need to run synthetic full backup. Please take a look at this existing topic > The need for Active Full backups

- Is there any possibility to defrag a VBK?

No, but check out this topic > Wanted: Compress Backup Files

Thanks!

[adrien.herve]

Thank you for this complete reply!