Disabling NAS Recycle Bin for the Backup Destination Share
NovaBACKUP
Last Updated: Mar 20, 2015 09:05AM PDT
The majority of NAS manufacturers enable a form of "Network Recycle Bin" so that if users delete files the files will actually move themselves to a folder on the NAS in that network share permanently. This recycle bin makes sense for most NAS shares but not for your destination backup storage location where NovaBACKUP is storing your backup sets. You would not want backup sets deleted either by a NovaBACKUP Retention job or deleting by a server administrator moved to another folder on your NAS as that defeats the purpose of "Retention", disk space will not be freed on the NAS because of this. This means that your NovaBACKUP Retention job may appear not to be functioning correctly if your destination storage device is a NAS. Buffalo and QNAP as well as other NAS manufacturers turn on the Recycle Bin for each network share that is created on the NAS.
For Buffalo NAS devices this folder is called "trashbox" and is located in the root of each share; for Buffalo NAS it is 100% by default enabling the Recycle Bin on every share created. For QNAP NAS devices this folder is called "@Recycle" and is located in the root of each share. To have NovaBACKUP's Retention feature actually SHOW free disk space on your NAS you would have to turn off Recycle Bin on the NAS itself so that the files that we HAVE been deleting do not just go to the "Recycle Bin" folder located in the root of the destination storage location NAS share (I.E. the share that you are creating your backups on).
Turn off the Network Recycle Bin feature of your network share where NovaBACKUP is storing it's backups, for a specific guide for Buffalo NAS read this guide and for a specific guide for QNAP NAS read this guide, and for a specific guide for Seagate NAS read this guide.
On a Buffalo NAS for example this folder will still be located on the NAS share even after disabling Recycle Bin, you will still have to manually delete the "trashbox" folder in this example:
"\\SERVERNAME\ServerBackup\trashbox\".
The trashbox folder will not be re-created by the Buffalo NAS for that network share and you will be able to see our retention reflect free disk space after files are deleted. The trashbox folder on your network share right now is probably showing many gigabytes worth of data inside, because when NovaBACKUP Retention runs it deletes the file on the NAS but the NAS itself moves that deleted file to the trashbox automatically as soon as the retention runs.