Understanding and Managing Retention of Backups

[eliwap]

Hi Everyone

I'm new to Proxmox Backup Server and I'm really having a hard time understanding backup retention. So I hope somebody can answer a couple of my questions.

1) When are full backups performed
When I configure a backup for a server I just configure a backup. I understand that the backups are always incremental. Which means the first backup is a full backup with subsequent backups grabbing differences.... For how long? When will another full backup be performed? Will another full backup be performed?

2) Keeping Last.... Backup
This part is really really confusing for me. When I perform a backup I just perform a backup. I could be doing it once a day, once a week, etc. So I do not understand within the context PBS what Hourly, Daily, Weekly, etc backup is for retention. I'm just running backups, and I would like to keep X number of backups. Are 24 Hourly backups consolidated to a daily backup? Is 7 daily backups consolidated to a weekly backup? Are 12 Monthly backups consolidated into a yearly backup?

I hope somebody can clarify this for me

Thanks

Eli

 

[Matthias.]

1) Every backup is a full backup. The data is stored in chunks, and these chunks can be referenced by an arbitrary number of backups.

2) Our docs describe it here https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/maintenance.html#retention-settings-example
They are not consolidated, rather, some backup are retained and the others deleted.
There is also the pruning simulator https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/prune-simulator/index.html, which might help with visualizing

 

[eliwap]

Thank you for your response.

I guess I just one last question. I realize that this one may seem a little dumb, but, If I create a scheduled backup of 6 servers and configure to keep the last 4 backups, it will keep the last 4 for all 6 servers? correct?

 

[Matthias.]

With servers you mean VMs? yes, exactly. The garbage collection settings are per backup group.
However, especially with backups, I would strongly suggest you that that whatever you configure works the way you want

 

[eliwap]

Thanks again