Tagged VM backups not deleting after 14 days

[Amarokada]

Hi

We have just discovered that Veeam is not deleting VM backups as per the 14 day deletion setting in the jobs. Most of our jobs use the Prism central Category flag to pick the VMs to include in the job. We have over 1300VMs being backed up each day.

On a job that doesn't use the category flag (a couple of VMs we specifically select in the job), we can see that the retention job that runs under system each day is cleaning those jobs up, listing the VMs in the job that need older backups deleted in the chain (forever incremental with 2 synthetic fulls during the week). However we never see any of the 1300 odd VMs listed in the system\background retention logs, even though they have the same forever incremental with 2 synthetic fulls per week. However those backups are processed and older points in the chain are removed.

We have quite a lot of churn on these VMs, coming and going, and we rely on the 14 day setting to delete entire backups from the repository if that VM has been deleted from the system, but it looks like that's never been happening, and we've found 31TB of backups we shouldn't have.

Is this a known issue before I open a ticket?

Regards
Rob

[Amarokada]

Just to add, we never seem to see the warning in backup jobs where it says "xxx is no longer being processed in this backup job, check if this is a mistake" or whatever it exactly says. So I think this is linked to the fact Veeam is not keeping track of the VMs previously backed up when using the Category flag for choosing VMs to backup.

[ronnmartin61]

@Amarokada not a known issue that I'm aware of please post the case number so I can track it...

[Amarokada]

Case # 07731316

[ronnmartin61]

@Amarokada I have been following the case and see this is a known issue which we have a private hotfix for. Anyone else seeing the same should contact support for the fix...

[Amarokada]

I've applied the fix tonight (AHV plugin 12.7.1.16). I suspect if this will retrospectively remove older backups it will happen during the next backup or system retention task, so will check in again tomorrow.

[ronnmartin61]

@Amarokada in my small scale test it did run retention properly on excluded and expired backup chains once jobs were run post-hotfix install

[Amarokada]

Just reporting in that the fix seems to work. In total 58 backup chains were deleted as part of the backup jobs when they ran. You can see them mentioned at the end of the job, but also in the success list individually as "Backup Deletion Job".