Size of Full backup forever?

[tfloor]

Hello,

Example.

I have a server with 150 GB of data.
Doing a first FULL backup and forward incrementals for 14 snapshots and on saturday a synthetic full.

After that i will remove 50GB of data from that server. So my server has 100GB in use.
But in my first full there is 150GB of data, and with synthetic fulls it's always: Previous (synthetic)FULL+Incr=new synthetic Full.

So is it the case that the 50GB of data is forever in my backups?
Do you need to do active fulls or something to get the benefits of removed data

Thanks.

[foggy]

Do you have the transform option enabled? Without transform, new synthetic full consists of only actual data blocks, while with transform enabled deleting data from VM won't decrease the VBK file size, but just mark all the corresponding blocks inside the file as unused (so that they could be reused by some other data). NTFS does not allow "shrinking files", so in order to reduce VBK file size, you need to run sdelete on the VM first to zero all unused blocks and then perform an active full backup.

[tfloor]

foggy,

I'm not using the transform option.
So i finished with only .VBK and .VIB files.

Is that clear enough?

[foggy]

In this case synthetic full will not contain the deleted data.

[tfloor]

In this case synthetic full will not contain the deleted data.

So what's the recommendation for this?
Is there a best practice....
Don't know how other organisations are playing with this thing?

[Gostev]

They just don't worry about this. Your scenario is simply not valid. In real world workloads, data is never just removed, but is always replaced with more data (immediately, or eventually). When was the last time that you removed a hard drive from any of your computers, because you did not need the disk space that you needed before?

[tfloor]

I think that was in 1938 wednesday.

[dellock6]

Why don't you run a transform job once and then wait for the retetion period to expire the old bigger backup?

[tfloor]

It's possible but not a nice one when you finally have my whole setup including backup to tape ready.
When I get rid of tape backups its much easier to redesign things fast without further impact

[tfloor]

How about simply right click on the job where the decreased vm's are in and select perform full backup. ?
Very simple brainwave but I think that is A solution?
Then there is a new decreased full forever.

[foggy]

If your goal is to get the decreased full backup asap, then performing active full is the way to go.

[tfloor]

Active full is the same result as ' perform full backup' manual option. Am I right ?

[Gostev]

Yes, same thing.

[tfloor]

Normally I do a synthetic full on Friday. What If I start manually a full on that day. Is it again doing a synthetic full after that according to the schedule. I want to replace a scheduled synthetic with a manual active full. Does veeam understand that?

[foggy]

No, in this case synthetic full will not be performed (no increments to combine).