Please explain the retention policy

[nospecialist]

Could someone please explain the VDR retention policy. What do the different fields mean?

Let's say I want the VDR to keep backups of the two previous nights, but delete every backup older than that. How do I configure the retention policies?

Now I have tried it this way:

Retention policy: Custom

Number of recent backups to to retain: 2

Older backups to retain:

0 Weekly backups

0 Monthly backups

0 Quarterly backups

0 Yearly backups

But for example today, when I look at the retention policy configured this way, it shows 5 different backups of each VM included in this backup job. What am I doing wrong? Could someone please explain how to use the custom retention policy correctly. Thanks!

[chriswahl]

Your retention policy looks correct. The VDR guide explains why this is occuring:

If the deduplication store is less than 80% full, the retention policy is run once each week. If the deduplication

store is more than 80% full, the retention policy is run once each day. If the deduplication store is full, the

retention policy is run immediately if the policy has not been run within the last 12 hours.

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vdr_12_admin.pdf

[nospecialist]

Thank you Chris for your answer.

That's pretty interesting. So now I understand that VDR runs each day because there is enough free disk space on my deduplication store, but they still don't give a clear answer as to why it keeps more backups than what is defined in the retention policy of the backup job. Maybe that is also because of the free disk space. I just think it is a bit confusing that it doesn't do what is defined in the retention policy.

I wonder that when there is less than 20% free disk space left on my deduplication store, and it only runs once a week, will it then start to keep only the last two backups of the VM's like I have defined in my retention policies?

I wish VMWare would explain VDR in more detail.