Weekly Backup

[ady_td]

I have veeam install ed on a Windows 2003 server running one backup job with 3 servers in it.
i want ot run a full backup on a sunday then run incremental on mon/Tur/Wed/Thu/Fri/ Sat/, then run a full again on the Sunday and start all over again with the job, so it removes any of the previous weeks full or incrementals.

i setup a job to run all week selecting in the advance option to run a full on Sunday, it completed this full but still left the older backups.

Question:

1. are the incremetals following the second Sunday full backup changes since that backup or the previous first Sunday backup ?
2. if I delete the first weeks files from just with Windows explorer, what effect will this make on veeam backup itself.

any help people, I am new to this software solution.

cheers Ady

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Ady,

1. Could you tell us how have you configured the retention policy for your jobs? Each incremental job run after the second Sunday, will insert the changes to the second Sunday VBK file.

You may look through existing topic about Full backups, that might be useful:
What is best way to do full backup monthly?

2. If you delete the rollbacks (VRB files) manually, this won't affect the last state of the backup, but you'll see deleted restore points to be available in the SQL configuration database while using Restore Wizard.

So I would recommend you to perform this kind of tasks by adjusting retention policy in the advanced job settings and reducing the number of restore points to keep. This will let Veeam Backup remove unnecessary points automatically on the next job run.

Thank you!

[Gostev]

Here is the good recent thread about backup chains:
delete onse savepoint in a backup job

And there are many more existing topics, you may want to search through this forum if you need more information.

[ady_td]

I have read some of the information on the links. if for example my srver has 100Gb, and a dialy change of 10GB I run a backup with a full on Sunday then the changes every day with a retension period of 7 days, i get:

sunday - Full backup - 100Gb
Monday - Changes - 10 Gb
Tuesday- Changes - 10 Gb
wednesday - Changes - 10 Gb
Thursday - Changes - 10 Gb
Friday- Changes - 10 Gb
Saturday - Changes - 10 GB
Monday - Changes - 10 Gb

i then get a full backup of 170GB.

I guess to allow the 7 day restore points it has to keep the orginal Sunday full backup and the changes for the last 7 days ? is that correct.
So i will need disk space for 2 full backups and 14 changes ?
at what stage will veeam delete the ful backup from the disk ?

[Gostev]

No, your example above is not correct, as the chain is actually reverse:

Sunday: Synthetic full (VBK)
Saturday: Reversed increment (VRB)
Friday etc: Reversed increment (VRB)
...
...
Reversed increments forever, or until latest synthetic full from previous chain, that was "stopped" by new full backup...

Here is a good explanation:
Veeam Synthetic Backup Explained

Veeam deletes latest VRB files according to the retention policy in the end of each backup cycle.

[ady_td]

Cheers, I think im getting there.

So if i run my first backup and then set the retension to 7 days and select not to run a full backup on any day in the week, it will run a full backup into a VBK, then the second backup will complete the incremental changes since the first VBK inject that into the VBk keeping this file upto date but at the same time take out the previous day data (that was changed) out of the VBK and creates a VRB for restore reasons.

is that correct ?

[Vitaliy S.]

Yes, that's correct.

[ady_td]

well i thought it was a pretty good backup product when i first saw it but now i think it is the best, going to buy it now

Thank for all your help and patience

A