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Cleanup of prior incremental backups after automatic new restore point

BJB
Level 5

Greetings,

I am still on version 16 and plan to upgrade soon.  I have automatic weekly backups running for a drive C, and drive D to my NAS.  

I know based on some settings and the phase of the moon, (just kidding here) SSR creates a full new image (base I think it is called?).  I would have thought this would have happened the first week of January because I thought it was set to only do one once a year?  However last night SSR apparently created a new, full image/restore point as it consumed 2TB of my NAS!

Shouldn't DDR automatically delete the old initial restore point base when it does this? Or at least some of the incrementals since that old base from (I guess) last year?

Apparently it does not because if it did, my total useage of my NAS would not have increased that much.

I know last time I tried to clean up old restore points it was a bit scary and cumbersome.  I know you can see various peices of info on them on that one screen where it shows the last backup by drive and then below shows info on the various restore points.  How can I:

1) Make sure I keep my most recent "base" restore point.

2) Recover enough incrementals since the last base to re-capture some of my storage. I do not need 52 weeks of restore points.  

3) I assume I cannot just go back to my last base and delete that because then all of the intervening incrementals are now useless, correct? Or do I need to do just that.....delete the old base and all incrementals through last week? And I know it is best to do this from within the software as if I do it directly on the NAS file management, SSR loses its history.

4)What are the best settings for my backup job so it does this in the future automatically?  I remember going through this with my old NAS and and an older SSR version but we assumed back then it was a network glitch or something that made it not delete old versions. Apparently not. 

Also, hopefully the recent patches for version 18 have solved some of the issues I saw reported.  I want to upgrade to that when I upgrade to the latest Windows 10 build.

Thanks for some quick help. I need to open up some space on that NAS quickly.

BJB

 

 

3 REPLIES 3

criley
Moderator
Moderator
Employee Accredited

@BJB

In simple terms...

  • When creating a backup job, you specify how many sets you want to keep (set = base backup + incrementals)
  • If you specify to keep 3 sets, after the base backup of set #4 is complete, the oldest set will then be auto-deleted
  • The deletion happens after the base of set #4 is complete, not before (a common misunderstanding)

If you are not seeing this, something is going wrong ...

criley,

Good to hear from you and thanks for the quick respense!  I will check those details. 

In the interim can you please tell me exactly how to manually identify the prior backup sets, base backup, incrementals.....the terms get tedius...but what I can safely delete from the past and just keep this new base backup? I need to free up that space.

Or...if for example I have the number of backup sets to keep at 2 (which means nothing is going to change for another year at which point it makes backup set 3 and deletes the oldest one) and I change it to 1, after the next incremental will it THEN automatically delete the last backup set?

I am getting a severe case of deja vu.  Last time I checked this over a year ago I had the settings "right" but that old backup was never deleted automatically.

I guess another option is keep the old base backup from say 12 months ago and delete the incremental updates (restore points?) made since then manually?   

Thanks,
BJB

 

criley
Moderator
Moderator
Employee Accredited

@BJB

If you can provide a directory listing of the backup destination folder, I can then maybe make some suggestions.

Run this command from the folder where the backups are stored, then attach the text file here:

dir >c:\dir.txt