Clarification for option: Retention Policy for Deleted VMs

[morty]

I'm setting up a forever-forward incremental backup job that backs up multiple VMs once per day and has 7 restore point retention (1 week).

If I remove/exclude a VM from the backup job will it then be removed from the backups after 7 days because I've set it to only keep 7 restore points or do I still need to enable the "Retention Policy for Deleted VMs" and set it for 7 days to have excluded VMs deleted from the backup after 7 days?

[Shestakov]

If you don't select Remove deleted VMs data after checkbox and remove/exclude a VM from the backup job, the backups will not be deleted.
General retention is restore point-based, not time-based.
Thanks.

[morty]

So it wouldn't be removed even if the regular restore point retention is set at 7 days?

[foggy]

Right, if you disable retention for deleted VMs, their data will be kept in the full backup forever. When/if you perform an active full, the new backup file will contain only actual data.

[DGrinev]

You use Forever-Forward incremental backup method, so data blocks of removed from the job VMs will be injected into the full backup file by retention.
In case you will enable Remove deleted VMs - the space occupied by those VMs will be marked as available to be overwritten. Thanks!

[morty]

Great thank you.

[lowlander]

How about the option to choose for days as retention policy instead of restore points as retention policy ?

for example retention policy is 5 days, and we start a new chain on day 1 including all virtual machines. On day 6 we exclude one specific virtual machine.
day 6 until day 10 backups of all the other virtual machines except the one in the exclusion list are being made.
On day 11 someone decides to include the virtual machine again. My assumption is that for the specific virtual machine ( excluded and then included again ) day 2-3-4-5-11 chain is containing the restore points.

Am I correct, or do I lose day 2-3-4-5 while the retention policy is configured in days ( instead of restore points ) keeping only the restore point ( day ) on day 11

[Mildur]

Veeam will always retain the last three restore Point by default.
You will not loose all of the „old days“:

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=110

The minimum number of retained restore points is 3. This number does not depend on the number of days set in the retention policy. For example, the retention policy is set to 5 days. You launch the job after it was stopped for 10 days. Normally, Veeam Backup & Replication would delete all previous restore points. However, due to the minimum number of retained restore points, you will still have at least 3 restore points.