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Jeff7591's avatar
Jeff7591
Level 2
5 years ago

Deleting previous incremental backups after another full backup

Hello,

I have setup backup jobs to run a full backup once a week and incremental backups every day. I have set a retention period of one week. The problem is, once the next full backup is run, the previous full backup expires and is deleted which is fine but all of the incremental backups that are related to that backup are kept. They are deleted one by one each day that passes because the retention period is one week. Once the full backup is deleted that the incremental backups belong to they are useless and just take up space.

How can I delete the full backup along with all the incremental backups that belong to that full backup after the next full backup is run on a weekly bases?

Thanks,

Jeff 

20
Windows Server 2016

1 Reply

  • PJ_Backup's avatar
    PJ_Backup
    Moderator
    5 years ago

    Assuming you run the full on Saturday and the incrementals Mon-Fri you could in theory set the retention for the incrementals to 5 days rather than a week, which would speed up the expiration process slightly. Alternatively how about running differentials instead of incrementals - but with a shorter retention period of say two days. So although on Thursday the diff. would indeed be larger than the incremental would for a Thursday, at least the Monday diff. would have expired.. and so on.