My question is about how to manage the rotation (i.e., automatic deletion) of old backups when using Windows Server Backup.
I'm using Windows Backup on a Windows Server 2016 system. I know that backups are created as shadow copies on the destination drive I choose. However, I can't seem to get the rotation of the backups (deletion of the old shadow copies) to work correctly.
My backup destination is a separate hard drive (not the boot or OS drive). I have manually set a maximum shadow copy size on this drive to 3TB. I assumed that, when this limit is reached, old shadow copies will be deleted so that Windows Server Backup can save a new backup. However, this doesn't seem to be what's happening.
When the limit of 3TB is reached, I get the following message in Event Viewer:
The shadow copies of volume T: were deleted because the shadow copy storage could not grow in time. Consider reducing the IO load on the system or choose a shadow copy storage volume that is not being shadow copied.
After that, I find that ALL shadow copies on the disk have been deleted, which means that I have now lost all backups!
I've reviewed Microsoft's documents and done a number of searches for solutions, but it remains unclear to me how I'm supposed to configure shadow copy storage on my destination drive so it deletes old backups as needed.
Some have suggested I should set the shadow copy limit to "unlimited". But I do want to limit it — I would prefer not to let my backups grow unbounded until the disk is full.
Can anyone explain how shadow copy growth can be managed, and how I can achieve the automatic removal of old backups?
Thank you very much for any help!
Best Answer
I tried using Windows Server Backup but didn't really like it and was advised to try Veeam free backup solutions. It gets the job done and I would also recommend you to take a look at it and try it out.
https://www.veeam.com/windows-endpoint-server-backup-free.html