Vault Backups - Purge old

[cbenner]

Is there something in the Vault backup task setup that will allow me to purge backups after a certain time period has elapsed, or do I just have to remember to go in there and clean them out manually?

[cbenner]

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@cbenner wrote:

Is there something in the Vault backup task setup that will allow me to purge backups after a certain time period has elapsed, or do I just have to remember to go in there and clean them out manually?

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And another question from our IT department (though I'm not sure why he's asking)... is it ok to rename the folder created by a full backup, or will an incremental no longer recognize that as the lastes full backup.

[mpatchus]

Renaming the folder has no impact on the Vault Restore process.

I keep 5 days worth of daily backups (without libraries), and 3 weeks worth of full weekly backups with libraries.

It is done automatically through my batch file script.

Its kind of quirky, but it works.

Here's the basic workflow for keeping three days worth.

You can tweak as desired to keep however many days worth you want.

I use sequential letters for each day.

My current backup will always create a backup to "foldername\Daily\A"

Yesterday's backup will be "foldername\Daily\B"

Day before would be "foldername\Daily\C" and so on.

So in your script, the first thing to do would be to remove the oldest backup.

Then move the other folders one letter up.

This part of your backup script would read (assuming you have 3 backups)

RMDIR /Q /S "foldername\Daily\C"

MOVE /Y "foldername\Daily\B" "foldername\Daily\C"

MOVE /Y "foldername\Daily\A" "foldername\Daily\B"

MKDIR "foldername\Daily\A"

Then your backup command line with whatever switches you want enabled.

Here's a snippet from one of my old scripts....

REM =======================================================< DAILY VAULT BACKUP >=======================================================
REM DELETE B AND CASCADE A BACKUP SUBDIRECTORIES
RMDIR /Q /S "V:\ADM03\Daily\B"
MOVE /Y "V:\ADM03\Daily\A" "V:\ADM03\Daily\B"
REM =======================================================
REM CREATE A NEW DIRECTORY FOR THE BACKUP
MKDIR "V:\ADM03\Daily\A\"
REM

[mpatchus · Accepted solution]

Renaming the folder will have no impact on the restore process.

In fact I rename the folder every day as part of my backup script.

I keep three days worth of daily backups (without libraries) and everyday the oldest one is purged before creating that day's backup.

I also do a full backup with libraries every Saturday and I keep two weeks worth of them with the same process.

I do it all through my backup batch file script.

The current day's backup is saved in "foldername\A"

Yesterday's backup is saved in "foldername\B"

The day before is saved in "foldername\C" (and so on for however many days you want)

First part of the batch file is to remove the oldest saved backup.

next step would be to move the remaining backups one letter up (A to B, B to C, etc.)

Last step would be to create the current back up to A.

So assuming you want to have three days of backups, this portion of the batch file would read like so....

RMDIR /Q /S "foldername\Daily\C"

MOVE /Y "foldername\Daily B" "foldername\Daily C"

MOVE /Y "foldername\Daily A" "foldername\Daily B"

MKDIR "foldername\Daily\A"

Then run your backup command line.

Here's a sample snippet from one of my old Backup scripts...

[cbenner]

Thanks Mike, this sounds like exactly what we want (need) to be doing.  Our old IT guy didn't even want to touch Vault backups, relying soley on server backups.  We have a new guy now who is much more cooperative in this area, so we're trying to get things set up right.  We've been playing with fire long enough.

Do you do incremental backups though?  Or do you do a full one every night, with the exception of the libraries... .and then another full on the weekend WITH libraries? 

[mpatchus]

We used to do a full backup nightly, but now we only do full backups weekly, and do incrementals daily.

Our libraries don't change that often, so we only include them on the weekly full backup.

[cbenner]

Sounds great.  Thanks for the advice!

[ryan]

Careful: If you are restoring a vault from an incremental backup set, then YES, the re-naming of the folders is a problem.  This is because if you look inside an incremental backup you will see a file called BACKUPHISTORY.TXT which lists all of the folders that the incremental one depends on to restore.  Now, this would be easy to work-around since you could simply edit the file in Notepad to put in the correct folder names.

-Ryan