Purging old backups
Big problem here. Running 2019 with once a week full backups on Sundays at 2am. Purge settings were set (as default) to retain no more than 2 versions. If a 3rd or 4th were held the USB drive we are using would run out of disk space. So, three weeks in I come to find a third backup file on one of our systems - we are using this on 24 machines.
So, I want to only keep the last 2 backups on the drive. What is going on with the settings?
Ron, welcome to these public User Forums.
What exactly are your Backup Scheme settings, including those for Automatic Cleanup - a screen image would be helpful.
Please understand that ATI does not delete any older version chain files until after a new Full backup for a new version chain has been created, so even if you choose "Store no more than 2 recent version chains" for the cleanup settings, you still need space to hold those 2 version chains plus a further Full backup image file before the oldest chain is deleted.
I am sure I have the settings correct for what I want to have happen. They are set to retain no more than 2 and I found 4 on the backup drive we are using. And the same thing happened with Windows 10 installs as well as Windows 7 installs.
ATI was installed under a domain admin account and set to run every Sunday at 9am when no one is in. So, I just went in and reset all 26 machines' ATI installs again and did not logout as admin. We'll see what happens this Sunday.
Kind of pointless to set these routines up if the software does not work properly.
It would be great if we could see some screenshots to help confirm. Also, is the backup name for each system with nique on every computer and does each computer backup into it's own folder on the share?
That would be ideal to make sure each system is independent of each other on it's own ATI instance of that machine. Having similar backup names, especially in one folder could be problematic.
I've got ATI 2019 running on 3 machines, each with an OS backup to a local drive and each with another to a network share on my NAS. Cleanup and retention rules are working exactly as expected. If it's failing in every system in your environment, it could very well be the settings in place, or they were modified later, or the share folder setup and names. Wr have no way of knowing other than by what you report, but it would be odd that this is happening across the board.
Also, hopefully these weren't all deployed with an image that already ATI installed? That can cause big issues on domains when applications have the same GUID. I found this out the hard way with another backup product called Retrospect. We also have to install managed products like Symantec and McAffee outside of our image for the same reason or the management console will see all of the clients as being the same and get confused.
Each installation is on it's own with unique backup names for each machine. The failures were intermittent, some worked and some didn't. Every setting is exactly the same for each backup configuration.
The backups will run tomorrow. I'll see what happens since I have left the admin user account logged in for each machine. This might have been the issue - we'll see soon enough.
OK, thanks for some of the clarification. Looking forward to hearing back on the results.