Veeam Backup & Replication • Re: Help with Retention Plan based on drive space

Hello Jadon

I have a 12GB external drive that I setup with two partitions. One formatted as NTFS with 9300GB of space (Drive "X"), and the second as ReFS with 2450GB of space (Drive "V"). I had some corruption in the past while using ReFS, so that's why I have the majority of the space allocated as NTFS.

I believe Microsoft doesn't support reFS on external drives. Better to check with Microsoft and make sure that your disk model and connection method is supported.

My server backup takes the most space so I've changed the retention policy to only keep backups for 7 days instead of 10. But the backups on the X drive are not falling off.

You have weekly synthetic full backups configured, which means the backup job will generate a 3.2 TB file (according to your Explorer screenshot) every week. The short-term retention policy (your 7-day retention) will actually store at least 14 days of backups (2 full backups + 12 daily incrementals). We can't delete your oldest VBK (full backup file) and VIBs (incremental backup files) after just 7 days since they are still needed to restore from the other incremental backups in that chain. Old backup files are deleted only when the full backup and all its incremental backups fall outside the 7-day retention period.

Given this setup, you will never be able to store your 2 weekly full backups plus 1 monthly full backup on a 9.1 TB disk using NTFS. This is because 3 full backups at 3.2 TB each would total 9.6 TB alone, which exceeds your available storage. Furthermore, a new VBK needs to be created before older backups can be deleted.

With NTFS and your current retention settings, I would recommend ensuring you have at least 16 TB of disk space available as your repository to accommodate your backup requirements.

Please check out our calculator. Either lower your retention or buy bigger storage:
https://www.veeam.com/calculators/simpl ... ines/agent

How do I remove just the past several days worth of backups to free space up? It appears that changing the retention plan didn't clean them up.

The retention from the job can only be applied 7 days after a new full backup is created. You have not enough storage to create new full backups. Clean up will never happen. In that case you have to manually delete all backup files to free up storage for a new start.

Best,
Fabian

Statistics: Posted by Mildur — Sep 19, 2024 4:18 pm

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