Data Store backups not being deleted

[JonathanDandois]

My automatic Enterprise Data Store backups are not being deleted. The Data Store was configured to the default 4 day backup, 7 day retention (per describedatastore), but the backups in the relational datastore backup location span back about a month. Because they are the automatically generated ones, I cannot use deletebackup. It doesn't seem like the retention policy is being honored. thoughts? I read here that the default retention might be 31 days https://support.esri.com/en/technical-article/000012584, and that makes sense. The most recent backup is from today 1/12/22 and the oldest is from 12/15/21, with backups happening every 4 days. Anyway, i went and updated the backup rate and retention policy to 7 and 14 and then restarted DataStore service per that technical article. Guess we will see how things go in the next few days after the next cycle kicks over.

[DavidColey]

I guess so.  I have the exact same issue.  Default backup every 4 days, Retain for 7 days.  I'm glad you posted this because I didn't even know I had to restart the data store service after making a change. Nowhere in the Data Store command reference utility help does it mention that critical piece of info.  I guess it was assumed we all knew that....

But I can say that even with that policy in place, the backups are not deleted even after the 31 days. 

For us, we are usually applying windows updates to our servers on the third Wednesday of the month.  When the server restarts ( and thus restarting the data store service) the backups are deleted. But this December windows updates were not applied I am now sitting with 2 months of backups.  So my guess is, at least for our deployment, the data store service has to be stopped and started (or re-started) for the lock to be released so the backups can delete....

[JonathanDandois]

Thanks for the note @DavidColey I'll keep an eye on it and see how it goes.  Something is deleting them (I suppose after 31 days) since I have been running DS longer than that and the drive is not full!

[ahagopian_coj]

We are having the same issue and have 10.9.1.  Do you ever get the backups to automatically delete?

[DavidColey]

I would say you would have to schedule a data store service stop / start at some interval using windows task scheduler. Then the data store backups older than the retain policy will delete on the data store service start.

[JimJimerson]

Did you resolve the issue? We are havi g exact same problems with 10.9.1. Only found out when our low disk alarm sounded and wondered where the backups had come from.

[JonathanDandois]

@JimJimerson @ahagopian_coj the datastore backups are pruning themselves based on the configuration settings I have established. It's been some time, but i believe it required a clean install of DataStore.