Question about Backup Recovery 16 Retention Settings

[bahall29]

Hopefully someone can help me. I'd like an explanation of exactly how the "Retention" works for backup jobs. In my scenario I have scheduled a backup job to perform 6 incrementals and then a full backup. I'd like to only keep 1 week's worth of backups. How would I accomplish this via the retention settings? Would I choose keep a minimum of 7 backups? Would that mean each day the oldest incremental would be overwritten by the most recent incremental, and there would always be 6 incrementals and 1 full backup kept? If I wanted to keep 2 week's worth of backups would I choose to keep a minimum of 14 backups?

[John Paragon]

1) If you need to create your own backup strategy, you need to click “New strategy” on the “Schedule” tab.1.jpg

2) Then you need to select backup type (in your case it is “Full and incremental backup”) and the number of increments until next backup (1 backup + 6 incremental – one week, 1 backup + 13 incremental – 2 weeks) 2.jpg

3) And the last stage, you are interested in is “Retention”. You need to select “Enable retention”. 3.jpg

“A minimum of backups to keep” – is the number of backup chains you want to keep within the period of time in the second line “Define the number of days to keep backups”.
The program made 1 backup, then one more backup and the first backup will be deleted in 7 days and a new one created.