You can delete data from the Backup Storage tab in the agent

Alexander,
Thanks for the reply. My concern has to do with deletion of individual files. For example, lets say that in December of 2023 I created a file named Quicken_Bkup_20231221. Subsequent usage of Quicken and more current backups have rendered the December backup unnecessary so on my SSD the December backup file was deleted and no longer exists locally. In a situation like this was that December backup file removed from cloud storage when it was physically deleted from my SSD and no longer present when my next backup was performed? If it was not deleted from cloud storage how does one deleted it from Cloud storage? From what I see in the above example is that you can delete an actual backup set but not an individual file within the backup set. My concern is that there may be important files in a specific backup set that are important to keep. Am I missing something as I'm concerned that with my configuration set to incremental backups, individual files like the one in my example will never receive any further incremental versions and will just take up space in cloud storage increasing my cloud storage costs. I seem to remember that in the old Cloudberry backup before the latest backup model was created I could go out to BackBlaze and remove individual files but now the individual files are in a single, compressed files not individually stored in the cloud. That's why I'm confused..

I think I figured this out but if someone can confirm, please respond.

The way I understood how the old Cloudberry backup worked the first backup you made had to be a full backup and then all future backups were incremental. With the old Cloudberry backup, if I recall correctly, I could log into cloud storage and if there was a file that was outdated and no longer on my local drive, I could remove it from cloud storage. Based on the information I found online today, the new MSP360 backup works totally different.

With MSP360 it considers whatever files are in a backup to be a backup set and you cannot delete an individual file because the backup set only contains the files that the were present at the time of the backup so an individual backup set will never contain an old, outdated file.

The next piece is that if your backup is setup to do an incremental backup every day then you cannot delete any old backup sets as the current backup set is based on prior incremental backup sets. To be able to delete old incremental backup sets you must have a newer full backup and MSP360 will purge off the old incremental backup sets as they age unless you enable GFS.

My problem was that my backup definition file was setup for incremental backups only so my consumption of storage space kept increasing as nothing was being removed. To solve my problem I had to remove everything, which was not an issue, change my backup definition to remove Sunday from the incremental schedule and then add Sunday as a full backup and enable GFS for 6 weeks, 3 months and 1 year. After doing so I reduced my storage by 2/3 and MSP360 did a full backup since all of my old backup sets were purged.

So, if I understood anything incorrectly as to how MSP360 works please let me know.

Yes, your understanding is correct. With the New Backup Format, data is packed into archives and stored in generations (full + incremental). The "current" generation, which consists of the last full backup followed by incremental backups, will never be purged until a new full backup starts a new generation. This means that if you don't have full backups scheduled, the retention policy will never work.

Check this forum thread where I explain how retention works in detail. Additionally, you can refer to our help article for more information.