Hi @adrigo - If you have configured 7 Restore Points, you will have a minimum of that many files in your Repository. Veeam will not start deleting backup files until you have a minimum of 7 USABLE Restore Points. In other words, if you have 7 in your Repo now, and the next day a Full runs, well, Veeam does not delete any previous files because you don’t have 7 restore points yet in your new chain (a chain is a Full plus associated increments). Does that make sense?

See this info from the User Guid on backup modes to see if it makes more sense for you. Click for each “mode” for additional info on how they work with regards to backup files on disk.

Veeam has a great KB with video animation for each mode as well to help make it more clear from a visual standpoint as well - https://www.veeam.com/kb1799

Hi Coolsport, I thing to understand how the chain works, but this plugin does not allow restore points, only days, attached. We understand that a chain would be: a backup level 0 + 6 differentials = 7 days, or not?

So “days” works different, but the concept is the same as I shared because your backup runs once/day (daily).. You have 7 days configured. So, you need to have 7 restore points (days) always on disk at a minimum to have a chain you can restore from if needed. On the 8th day when you start a new chain with a Full (if you configured the job as Fwd Incremental with occasional Fulls, either Active or Synthetic, as noted in the Storage tab of your Advanced settings), none of your previous backup chain files (1F + 6 Increm) cannot yet be deleted because you need all of them to do a restore of any point within the chain. So, at 14 days, when your new chain has a full 7 days, then all your previous backup files (previous chain of 7 files) should be deleted. Make sense? 

One other thing about the ‘days’ option - you could have more than 1 backup file in a given day, but all those files constitue “1 day” in regards to your retention. For example, if you did a backup every 4hrs, you have 4 backup files per 1 day of retention, so files on disk for 7 days would be 28. Make sense?

Hope this helps.

I understand, we are going to wait one more week with 2 complete chains. But I see many options that do not exist in this Plugin. We are considering doing everything by Rman, but that way it would be a lot of manual configuration, which would be dangerous. Thank you so much!

Understood. No worries...glad to help! Post back how it goes.

Hi @adrigo , I’m just following up to see if the behavior of Restore Retention was as you wanted per your configuration, and/or if you had further questions?

Hello, Database administrators added a command in rman that enforced the retention, 

in the next backup job: OracleRMANConfigTool --set-force-delete

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/plugins/force_delete_rman.html?ver=120

we are still monitoring it

Thanks @coolsport00 

Ok, thanks for the update @adrigo 

Is your retention is related to your immutability configuration on your repo if you’re using it?

Pros/Cons with RMAN & Veeam about your scheduling method push or pull is depending of many factors not only the technical :)

Hi @adrigo -

I’m just following up on your retention post here. Are you all set on your RMAN Plugin DB retention? If any of the provided comments helped you out, could you mark which one did as ‘Best Answer’ so others who have a similar issue and come across your post may benefit?

Thank you.