Limitations and Considerations for GFS Retention Policy
Before configuring the GFS retention policy for a backup copy job, consider the following limitations and considerations:
Consider the following for general settings of a backup copy job:
- You cannot enable GFS retention settings if you use a backup repository with rotated drives as the target backup repository.
- [For yearly GFS cycle] If you enable only the yearly GFS cycle, you can encounter the case when there is one full backup and a large number of increments for the whole year. To avoid this case, it is recommended to enable an additional weekly GFS cycle. Weekly GFS cycle will update the backup chain every week which will allow removing excessive increment files.
- If for some reason the GFS synthetic full was not created in the scheduled day, Veeam Backup & Replication will create the synthetic GFS full after the next run of the backup copy job.
- If it is the day when the GFS full backup must be created and there were no new backup files since the last run of the backup copy, Veeam Backup & Replication will create the GFS full backup from the latest available backup chain.
- GFS full backups cannot be merged or deleted by short-term retention. However, regular (R) full backups can be merged and removed by short-term retention if GFS is disabled.
- [For immediate copy mode] If the backup copy job was not run when the GFS full backup must be created, the GFS full backup will not be created on this day.
If you want to use the periodic copy mode, consider the following:
- If Veeam Backup & Replication does not manage to transfer the restore point according to backup copy schedule, Veeam Backup & Replication will finalize the transfer anyway.
- Veeam Backup & Replication creates a GFS full backup even if the GFS full backup creation is scheduled when the backup copy scheduled run is not finished. On the day when the GFS full backup must be created, Veeam Backup & Replication shows a warning that the current backup copy scheduled run will be completed. The way Veeam Backup & Replication behaves further depends on the selected backup copy GFS method:
- In case of the synthetic full method, Veeam Backup & Replication first copies data for an incremental backup from the source backup repository and then, on the target backup repository, synthesizes the GFS full backup using this data and data of the already stored backup files.
- In case of the active full method, Veeam Backup & Replication copies data for the GFS full backup from the source backup repository and creates the GFS full backup on the target backup repository.