Rotated drives retention policy - out of diskspace

[Hans]

Hi

A while ago I installed and configured Veeam Backup and Replication version 7. In this setup the customer had three USB drives with each 1 TB.
The customer setup was made and setup with full backup and retention set to 3 so they would end up with 9 backups in total.

But now after the setup has running a little while they get a message saying that there isn't enough free space on the USB drives.
I wanted to hear if I made any mistakes in the backup job. I have provided a picture that show how the backup mode is setup.
http://s18.postimg.org/u7nf0ne6h/backup.png

Kind regards
Hans Chr. Andersen

[foggy]

Hans, having active full everyday along with synthetic full set on Sat is a bit overkill. What are the customer's requirements regarding restore points? Does he need to have 9 days RTO and just have full backups for each of them? What is the single full backup size? What is the rotating scheme for those 3 drives? Have you implemented the registry key, allowing for drives rotation?

[Hans]

Hi Alexander

I guess your right. So I would disable the synthetic fulls in this setup?
His requirement was to have as many as possible so the backup after compression would be around 300 GB so it would be possible for them to have 3 backups on each drives. I would expect that Veeam Backup could control this by looking at the backups made on the current disk that would be attached to the system.
The full backup size after compression is around 300 GB.
The rotating scheme is that the change the disk every day monday-friday.
I have created the registry mention in the article. But in order for it to work I had to set the backup job for Active full backup.

Looking forward to hearing from you

[veremin]

Hi, Hans.

Yep, if you want to have 3 full backups at each rotated drives, you should disable synthetic full and create a full backup on each day, specifying 9 as a number of restore points to keep. Assuming the drives are rotated on daily basis, you will have something like this:

Drive 1: 1st rp., 4th rp, 7th rp,
Drive 2: 2nd rp, 5th rp, 8th rp
Drive 3: 3 rp., 6th rp, 9th rp.

Once the 10th restore point is created, the retention policy will delete the oldest restore point (1st one). The following day, 11th rp will be created on drive 2, and 2nd rp will be deleted in accordance with specified retention policy.

So, as long as you rotate drives properly, keeping required drives order (1 -> 2 -> 3), everything should work, as expected.

Thanks.

[foggy]

And you actually do not need the key as it does not take effect in case of active fulls.