"Periodically every" backup - retention

[tonynray]

Quick question about retention

I have some backup jobs that are scheduled to run periodically every 30 minutes. The backups run just fine, however I'm noticing that the retention doesn't seem to be working as I expected. I have the retention set to keep 14 backups (which I thought would keep 14 days) and perform a synthetic backup every Saturday.

Unfortunately, this is the scenario I am seeing for all backups that run periodically throughout the day:

- Backup runs every 30 minutes, creating a total of 48 restore points each day
- On Saturday at 12AM, the synthetic full gets created after the first incremental
- After 13 additional incrementals, the previous entire chain gets removed, essentially starting the backup chain over at 12AM every Saturday

Is this normal? Would I need to configure the backup job to keep 672 restore points (equivalent to 14 days)?

Thanks!

Tony

[foggy]

Hi Tony, yes, this is expected. Retention you specify in the job is the number of restore points to keep, not the number of days.