Backup Copy GFS Retention Question

[Lincoln44]

Hello,

I'm having some trouble wrapping my head around the Backup Copy Job's GFS retention policy. I have a backup copy job setup primarily for long term storage. I would like to only retain 2 monthly backups and 1 quaterly, but realize I must have restore points to keep set to the minimum of 2. So my setup is currently 2 restore points to keep, 2 monthly backups (1st day of the month), 1 quarterly backup (last day of last month of the quarter), and the "Read the entire restore point from source backup instead of synthesizing it from increments" setting is enabled. With this setup, I thought that there would only ever be at most 3 restore points created from the restore points to keep option (previous 2 cleaned up upon the creation of the 4th) and then the monthly and quarterly backups would be created at their specified times. So far, this is not the case. The job was originally configured mid-August and currently has 1 full (monthly from 09-01-18) and 15 incrementals (09-02-18 through 09-16-18).

Do I have something configured incorrectly causing the incrementals to keep growing like this? I'm assuming if I don't change anything it will continue to make incrementals everyday until the next monthly runs, which is not what I want.

[Andreas Neufert]

Hi Lincoln,

thanks for the request.
"Read the entire restore point..." setting will enable Full processing from Source Backup. That means we will keep a (daily) incremental between the full restore points. If you do monthly (GFS) fulls, we will keep the incrementals between them. You can play a bit with the Restore Point simulator. But keep in mind that the restore point simulator is built in a way that the monthly/quarterly are created at same time. You had it on differen times, so we need to keep even more incrementals to cover this.

http://rps.dewin.me/?m=3&s=1000&r=2&c=5 ... =0,2,1,0&e
The "Active Full" checkbox is the "Read the entire restore point..." setting.

Overall best way is to disable this checkbox then you can run it like this
http://rps.dewin.me/?m=3&s=1000&r=2&c=5 ... =0,2,1,0&e

Tuning would be to disable the Job for the time you don´t need it and enable it for the processing of the monthly. This can be done maybe by powershell and a scheduler. Not ideal


The design of Backup Copy Job was done in that way to keep
3 copis of data (original, Backup, Backup Copy)
2 seperate media logics (not stored in the same format than source data)
1 other site
Customer requirement for fast backup and restore (keep most actual restore points)
Long term backup on cheeper media.

So the Backup Copy Job was created in a way to be placed on other site on cheaper media to hold a copy of actual restore point chain (7-30days) and then keep long term backups in GFS points.

[Lincoln44]

Thanks for the detailed update Andreas. I had read at some point in my research that the "Read the entire restore point..." option is faster, but didn't realize it would create more restore points, so that was the only reason I turned it on. I've gone ahead and turned that off as well as matching up the monthly/quarterly times. That should clean up what I need. Also, that Restore Point simulator tool looks extremely handy and I will be bookmarking that.

[foggy]

Hi Lincoln, this check box basically switches from forever forward incremental mode to simple forward incremental, implying the corresponding difference in how retention works.