Rotating drives

[frankive]

Hi.
we have 4 10TB dives rotating weekly which holds 8TB vkb file and 6 increments file. Retention set to 7.

Should we enable ForceDeleteBackupFiles tot be sure there is enought space left on the rotating usb-repository?
From what I am reading backup copy job should not need to ever have 2 full backup files on a rotating media.
But if it does, we dont have the space for that and would need to run a pre-job script to empty the foder.

Is the ForceDeleteBackupFiles key just aiming at the rotating repository or can it suddenly "attacks" our usual backup repositories and delete them?

[HannesK]

Hello,
please see https://www.veeam.com/kb1154

If a disk does not contain enough space for a new backup file, the job will fail instead of deleting old files. This can be avoided by deleting old files as soon as the disks are swapped. This can be done manually, via pre-job script, or with the registry setting described below.

Best regards,
Hannes

[frankive]

But that registry key; will it only target rotating repositories? Or can it accidently also hit our repositories for regular backup jobs?

[foggy]

Hi Frank, unless you have also ForceCreateMissingVBK set to 1, ForceDeleteBackupFiles value affects only rotated repositories, in case some files in the chain are missing there. Please note that backup copy job to a Windows-based repository is able to maintain retention on each rotated drive normally, so you do not need this value.

[frankive]

so windows server usb-drives will remove outdated files BEFORE the job will create a new full backup file?

[foggy]

Backup copy will not create new full, it is forever incremental. It will create a new increment and merge the oldest one into the full backup.