Troubles understanding scheduling in regards of recovery

[enettekoven]

Hi,

I am trying to match our restore needs to the scheduling in Veeam. From what I understand from the manual if I run a full backup (synthentic or active) all previous checkpoints will be merged (thus deleted) into the new full backup. Does this mean that I am unable to restore a VM or file from before the full backup? For example if the synthetic full runs on Saturdays, will I be able to restore items from the days before that Saturday? If yes, how far back does that go? If no, how can arrange this?

Our needs are to perform a weekly full backup and a daily incremental, we also need to be able to restore VM's or single items from any given day from 4 weeks ago. The full backups will be written to tape. I am not able to grasp the logic in the scheduling within Veeam.

Any help is much appreciated.

Regards,

Erik

[veremin]

From what I understand from the manual if I run a full backup (synthentic or active) all previous checkpoints will be merged (thus deleted) into the new full backup.

Your understanding doesn't seem correct. The merge process means that in order to create a new full backup the existing incremental points will be injected into the latest full backup. That's what synthetic backup does.

As to number of restore points (the oldest time you can restore from), it's controlled by job retention settings.

Thanks.

[enettekoven]

Ah yes, now I get it!

So I need to set the retention to 30 restore points if I want to be able to go back 30 days?

[veremin]

So I need to set the retention to 30 restore points if I want to be able to go back 30 days?

Correct. Though, in case of forward incremental chain, the number of restore points kept on disk will vary (see, Retention for forward incremental chain section).