Veeam Backup Copy Job (GFS question)

[jonny1133]

Morning all (Happy Monday)

I have a backup copy job with a retention policy set to 14 days.

I then configured GFS to Keep 1 weekly full backups (1 weeks)

I have monitored over the weeks, thinking i would see only 1 weekly full but after 3 weeks, i can now see 3 fulls? is this correct and why isn't that weekly getting replaced with another weekly (Since i set GFS to weekly (1)

Any light and understanding would be fantastic!

Jonathan.

[PetrM]

Hi Jonathan,

I've asked my colleagues from QA department to check this scenario explicitly, I'll update the topic as soon as I have more details.

Thanks!

[jonny1133]

Hi,

Thanks, look forward to hearing back.

[Mildur]

Hi Jonathan

You have configured to keep 14 days of restore points.
With the setting to keep 1 weekly full, you configured weekly synthetic fulls on the specific weekday.

If veeam would only keep the last fullbackup and delete all other, you wouldn‘t be able to restore the older incremental restore points which were created before the last fullbackup. An incremental restore point cannot be used for restores without it‘s fullbackup.

With a configuration of 14 days, you will have always backups for the last 14-21 days (2-3 fullbackups, 12-19 incremental). It‘s how a forward incremental chains works.

Thanks
Fabian

[PetrM]

Hello,

Basically, Fabian is right. We've checked this scenario in our lab and I can confirm that the behavior described in the first post is the behavior by design. GFS retention policy functions in combination with short-term retention policy. Weekly GFS full backups are also seeds for further incremental backups that are retained according to the short-term retention settings, therefore the full backups cannot be deleted before the short-term retention period is over. Please refer to this example to see how it works in forward incremental mode.

However, I'm not sure that I understand what is the purpose of such a configuration? If you need to leverage long-term retention, then it should exceed your short-term retention settings, for example you can opt for storing 3 Weekly backups and 14 days for the short-term chain. Alternatively, you can just disable GFS retention, backup chain will be switched to the forever forward incremental mode and backup copy will start to merge increments to the full backup and you will have just one full backup.

Thanks!