Move older backup files elsewhere to free up space?

[tholyoak]

I have a backup job of an exchange server. I need retention for as long as possible (currently set to the limit of 999 days) in case we need to restore old individual e-mails. A little over 2 years ago, I started out doing incremental backups with a weekly full backup. After a couple months, I changed it to a monthly full backup. Eventually, I realized the best use of disk space would be to switch to reverse incremental, which I've now been doing for a little over a year.

Now I've started getting warnings that the backup repository is down to 10% free disk space. It looks like a little more than 5 TB is taken up with the old full and incremental backups, prior to the reverse incremental. Can I safely move these somewhere else without hurting the backup job? And then hopefully I could move them back if I need to restore e-mail from that long ago? (I wish there was a way to convert the old files to reverse incremental and get rid of all the old full backups.)

I should mention that I'm using B&R Essentials 9.0.0.1491 on Windows Server 2008 R2.

[tholyoak]

Also, if this did work and was safe, how would it affect the retention schedule? Would it give an error saying it was trying to delete files that aren't there? Or would it just apply the retention schedule to the files that still exist in the folder?

[tholyoak]

The oldest files were a little more than 2 years old, so I ended up just setting the retention period to 730 days, and letting the problem files gradually drop off. When they're all gone, I'll set it back to 999 and should have plenty of space left for it.

[foggy]

If you'd like to keep them for possible restores, you can just move them anywhere. Provided current reverse incremental chain is intact, there will not be any issues. You will be able to import the moved chain back into Veeam B&R, once required.