

Deleting the oldest 2 incrementals would cause the backup chain to be invalid as the oldest retained incremental requires the previous 2 incremental backups to complete the chain. After retention, the most recent 4 incremental backups are retained.

The retention rules are set to retain 4 incremental backups. In the example below, before retention, there is 1 Full backup, 1 Differential backup and 6 Incremental backups. This is achieved by merging older Incremental backups when required. When deleting Incremental backups the integrity of the backup set is maintained by ensuring that the chain is never broken.

When deleting Differential backups all linked incremental backups in the same backup chain (set) are also deleted. When deleting Full backups all linked incremental and Differential backups in the same backup chain (set) are also deleted This operation will delete the entire backup set.
