Morning, how frequently does the job run? I notice no incremental files does this just run weekly?

Hello @Nexder 

It seems that you are scheduled Full backup to run every 5 days and there is no reverse backup. Could you please share a screenshot of your schedule settings?

Are you doing daily Backups as well or only weekly?

The job runs once a week on Sunday.

The small setup:

Server with connected Tandberg RDX External Drive published over a Network-Share to the Veeam-VM

   - VM1 on Server which is backuped

   - VM2 on Server with Veeam to backup VM1

The External Drive should exchanged weekly (maybe sometimes they forget it)

I see that the full backups on disk are not from every week. So, it seems that most weekly fulls are deleted after the retention period… Did some processes over time fail?

If the job runs every week, the oldest vbk will removed after the 11 full-backup is completed.

11 full backups are too much.

Is it possible to changes this?

I thought that this is set up by the Retention policy?

The external Drive has a capacity of 1TB and run out of space.

To save space, you can make full backups on a monthly basis. The weekly backups are then incremental and smaller.

As long as you’ve got it set to retention days and not points it’ll process once the backup is more than 10 days old during next job run, but the job also will still mandate a minimum of 3 backups.

I’d suggest not creating each backup as an active full and instead making use of the incremental technology to ensure you only have a single full backup file to protect your free space. As it’s a network share just be sure your gateway server is located near the network share for best performance with this.

The retention policy is 10 days, not 10 restore points. A backup should be deleted at the second run after the creation of a backup. backup creation → day one, backup one week later → day 8 for the first backup, backup one additional week later → day 16 of the first backup and it gets deleted.

In the screenshots most backups are deleted. So, this has to be another problem…. Do all backup processes finish successfully? You can look on the History tab in the console for the results of the processes…

Edit:
ok, Michael was faster.

We have two cartridges, both should contain a full backup, because one of them is always taken out of the building.

This also was my expectation by the policy.
 

I can also switch to a retention of 2 points if this will work.

The Screenshot shows one of the cartridge. It will exchanged always on monday. Thatswhy there are not all weekly backups are shown.

The Backups are always successfully (when not running out of space)

Short summary of what would be perfect:

Two cardriges for the External Drive:

• Sunday: full Backup to Cardrige1 (remove all older)
• Monday: Exchange Cardrige1 with Cardrige2
• Sunday: full Backup to Cardrige2 (remove all older)
• Monday: Exchange Cardrige2 with Cardrige1

i set the retention policy to 10 days to prevent the last valid backup from getting delted befor the next new one is created if someone forgot to exchange the Cardrige

but as u can see on the screenshot, there are backups still from 11.2022 and won’t get deleted

You say that some backup processes failed due to out-of-space situation. In this case there is no valid backup created and the backup process will not delete the older points….

Not sure if the next run will delete all older restore points or the ones that exceeded the retention time since the last run of the backup job. But this would explain why there are sometime s 4 weeks and mot between the restore points on your disk….

yes, the backup failed only a few times because of missing disk space. In this situations i deleted the old backups and restart the backup. So all current existing backups were created before the next out-of-space error occured (today).

As u described all backups, older than 16 days should be deleted so far.

I don’t know how Veeam detects the old files, but could it be possible, that by exchange the cartridge, Veem coldn’t find the “old” backups and mark them internaly as deleted and not existing anymore, so it doesn’t handle them in further processes?

How is the repository defined? Is it based on rotating media?

Otherwise Veeam has problems to keep track of everything….

The repository is from Type SMB. There is not option for a rotating media.

i created a PowershellScript, which still remove all older files after the process.

But i understand why my scenario is not supported, or expected.

OK, just to clarify, you have two different external hard disks to write your backups and switch weekly between them. Correct?

If this is the case, I would really suggest to follow the direction in this helpcenter chapter:
https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/vsphere/backup_repository_rotated.html?ver=120

correct

This would be a great way, but the problem here is, that the RDX is connected to the Server and Hyper-V is (so far i know) unable to passthrough the USB-Device to the VEEM-VM.

Edit:

Sorry still found the option and the posibillity to add the RDX on the Server as a rotating device.

I will give it a try. The option seems to be the solution for my problem