VRB Question

[flavor4real]

Hello,
I have researched the vrb/ vib/ vbk subject several times. I have following sutuation.

The Backup Job:
- Virtual Appliance, Disk-to-Disk
- 7 Servers (~1TB)
- Retention > 14
- Schedule: Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu,Fri; every 6hrs, starting @ 1200, Synthetic on Friday

I have a execl sheet and record the VIB's between each VBK, which is friday-to-friday. I usually count ~22 vib's (incrementials) between the vib's. Because, I have the synthetic set on every friday, the retention of 14 will be overseen by veem and it continues until the next synthetic kicks in. that's what I understand from previous posts and research.

Because I'm getting low on my backup disk space, I decided to select the checkbox "Transform previous full backup chains into rollbacks". I understand that the synthetic full creation time will takes longer. It actually jumped from ~40 min to ~4-5hrs, but that's fine with me.

Today, I've checked the counts between the vbk's and I only had 8 (actually, there is only one vbk and previous vrb's. I've reviewed the Backup properties for that job and I see that, the latest restore point was February 8/2011. My questions is, why did the latest restore point changed to feb/8, by when I would not have select the checkbox "Transform previous full backup chains into rollbacks" would result to a latest restore point of feb/4 maybe a few days later? Below is a better explanation..


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Backup Job (without "transform.." selected, example of a prevous count)
VBK1- 1/28/2011 || VIB's between VBK's- 22 || VBK2- 2/4/2011
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Backup Job (with "transform.." selected)
VBK1 (not there)- 2/8/2011 || VIB's between VBK's (changed to VRB's now)- 8 (count backwards starting from VBK2) || VBK2- 2/11/2011

If I would not have selected "transform..", it would look like this
VBK1- 2/4/2011 || VIB's between VBK's- ~22 || VBK2- 2/11/2011
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

My thought was that with the "Transform previous full backup chains into rollbacks" selected, the set retention would not be overseen anymore and veem would run/clean the vib/vrb/vbk in conjuntion with the set retention (of 14 in this case). But on the other hand, i only have 10 vrb's.

I hope I have not explained my point to complicated, and maybe someone can kinda explain it. Thx

[Gostev]

You are correct. With transform enabled, we are able to remove older restore points immediately as they go away according to retention. Whereas with regular incremental without transform, we cannot remove individual restore points (only whole full backup chain at once, when latest incremental backup in this chain is no longer need for restore according to retention policy).

As to what happened in this specific case, and why you have less than 14 restore points - this would be best to investigate with our support looking at the transform log files.

Thanks!