How to Setup Retention When Multiple Backup Jobs on Same VM

[tprice]

Hi all,

I currently have 3 separate backup jobs for the same VMs, which run daily, monthly and quarterly. Daily is supposed to retain the last 30 jobs, monthly the last 6 and quarterly the last 4. I came to the realization today that the different jobs will be cleaning backups from the other jobs based on their own retention settings. What would be the best way to do multiple backups of the same VM, at different frequencies and retain different amounts for each schedule?

 

[UdoB]

I currently have 3 separate backup jobs for the same VMs, which run daily, monthly and quarterly.

Yeah, that's not the usual approach. (But if it works for you... is is fine.)

Just run one job with the highest frequency (daily).

Learn how "pruning" works, use the Simulator: https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/prune-simulator/

One single "Prune Job" can specify that you want to keep the latest 30 (or 30 daily, that's not the same!) and 6 monthly and 2 yearly backups. There is no "quarterly" though...

 

[tprice]

Yeah, that's not the usual approach. (But if it works for you... is is fine.)

Just run one job with the highest frequency (daily).

Learn how "pruning" works, use the Simulator: https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/prune-simulator/

One single "Prune Job" can specify that you want to keep the latest 30 (or 30 daily, that's not the same!) and 6 monthly and 2 yearly backups. There is no "quarterly" though...

Having one backup job running daily and then pruning it down into what is needed daily/monthly/yearly makes a lot more sense. Would it be best to do the pruning from the PBS?

 

[UdoB]

Would it be best to do the pruning from the PBS?

Well, it might be easier.

You can specify pruning rules in the backup job. If you have different groups of VMs with different rules and one job each.

I had a system with 20 jobs --> 20 times the same pruning rules --> that's hard to maintain. In that case it is obviously better to leave those "Retention"-Settings in the Backup Job empty and specify it once on the PBS.