Retention policy on backups without a schedule

[Matthewh]

So as I understand it a backup without a schedule will never process old restore points in line with the retention policy.

The scenario we have is a customers backups have grown considerably over time so we have now split the backups into smaller jobs to spread out the workload.

We need to retain the existing backup job for compliance while the new ones start taking backups but is there a way to get the old one to process the old backups and remove them when there is no schedule?

[Mildur]

Hi Matthew

With V11, GFS restore point retention will be processed in the background, even without an active backup job.

Veeam Guide - Background GFS Retention

That should help you to automatically get rid of the older gfs restore points of the removed vms from the backup job.

[Matthewh]

Hi Mildur,

Brilliant thanks, even though the backup doesnt run its good to know that it will be processed for retention anyway, we have it set to 14 days as it us so it should age out as it has previously because of our synthetic full schedule we usually end up with 21 restore points in one cycle.

[foggy]

Please keep in mind that background GFS retention works for VMs that are not covered by a job anymore - if your requirement is to keep the old job with all VMs in it, that wouldn't help.

[Gostev]

Actually, there's no such limitation as "works for VMs that are not covered by a job anymore" only.
He can keep the old job disabled, in fact this is exactly the scenario from What's New for V11 (p. 7)