deleted item retention setting question

[jcofin13]

Default jobs do not have these feature turned on.

I have a backup job where i have turned this on to clean up and purge older vms that are no longer needed at all. Mostly in a effort to free up space and storage cost from AWS via the SOBR.

I can see VMs from back in 3/2022. I turn on this setting and set it to 2 years (730 Days). This should be then to delete anything older than 2 years on vms that have been purged, removed or upgraded. The job runs and i would expect that all the vms on the aws storage in our sobr prior to this date to to be gone and cleaned up but they are not. Why?
The job log does show all the "<vm>" is no longer processed by this job messages for all those i would expect to have been cleaned up but browsing under Backup-->disk-->capacity tier still shows them all there.

If a vm is tagged as "no longer processed by this job" its because that old vm has been purged from vcenter and is no longer in use. If veeam knows that it should clean it up correct? If we dont want to keep the vm on the backup shouldn't deleted item retention take care of cleaning that up after X number of days as per the setting?

Are you supposed to track every single vm you ever delete or purge and then manually delete it from capacity tier? That doesn't make sense.

[jcofin13]

Ive put in a veeam support case, uploaded logs and just waiting on a response.

[veremin]

The deleted items retention feature also works for the backups stored in the Capacity Tier. So, if a machine is no longer processed on-premises within the retention period specified for deleted items, its backups are automatically removed from both Performance and the Capacity Tier.

So, could you please confirm the following:

- It is not a GFS restore point?
- The backup server has not created any valid restore points for this deleted machine in 730 days?
- There are no incremental dependent restore points for the deleted machine?

Thanks!

[jcofin13]

I have since reduced the deleted item retention setting down to 365 days (1 year). I would like to get down to ~45 days eventually.

-I dont see any GFS designation on the restore points that remain.

-I dont see any recent restore points. ON the restore points for a particular vm im looking at all are over the deleted item retention period of 365 set on the job.

-I dont know how to where to check for the dependencies. For the vms i do show typically 1 vbk or full and a couple incrementals but all restore points in question are outside the deleted item retention window.

[jcofin13]

What?

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... iderations
"[For backups stored in the capacity tier] Background retention job does not delete capacity tier copies of backup data directly. However, if background retention removes local copies of backups, they may also be marked for removal on the capacity tier. In such a case, cleanup during the next SOBR offloading session will remove them from the capacity tier. "

SO according to that it cleans it up sometimes and sometimes it does not?

This doesnt make sense. Do i need to manually delete them every time a vm is removed from the environment then?

I must be missing something.

[veremin]

Background retention is unrelated to deleted items retention; it is a completely different functionality primarily responsible for removing orphaned backups — those without any associated jobs.

In your case, I would recommend continuing to work with our technical support team to determine the root cause of this issue.

Thanks!

[jcofin13]

Thanks. Yeah i found that and i guess i thought the 2 were related.

I will keep working with support. I cant understand why it hasnt removed these items. Perhaps veeam wont remove any historical items until after this feature is turned on and the the threshold has past meaning if you have items in a job that are 1000 days old and you turn on and enable deleted item retention for a setting of 500 days, it will only delete items that have reached 500 days old after the setting was turned on. Just a thought. Even that doesnt make a lot of sense though.

[veremin]

We do not have a condition that requires a specified amount of time to pass from the moment you enable this checkbox in order for deleted items retention to kick in. So, the situation still seems unusual and should be carefully reviewed by our support team.

[jcofin13]

Reviewed with support and it was suggested that because we have a move policy on our sobr and that there was no local items on performance tier that veeam would not clean up capacity tier.

Veeam still knows that the backup restore points exist on the capacity teir as it can see them so im not sure that makes sense as to why it doesnt clean them up.

We were able to prove that we can delete the restore points on the capacity tier manually so in the end that was the answer. WE will need to go through all of them and purge them that way.

Odd.

[veremin]

Deleted items retention should operate independently of the policy configured on the Capacity Tier. Therefore, it doesn't seem like the engineer provided the correct answer. We will verify this assumption on our end tomorrow, but I don't believe it will prove to be accurate. Thanks!

[jcofin13]

Ok...yeah please verify. IN the mean time im trying to make a list of dates, vms and sizes on all my capacity tier vms that need to be cleaned up. I think im between 70 and 80 of them.

It could be that the tech wasnt 100% sure. It does seem odd that you would need to clean up manually despite veeam knowing about the restore points in question regardless of it being capacity tier.

[veremin]

Yes, it seems strange to us (myself and the QA team) that our product's ability to clean up objects related to a deleted machine would depend on the policy used in the Capacity Tier. Therefore, we've decided to re-evaluate this scenario to be completely certain.

I believe we will conduct tests today or tomorrow, and I will update you with the results.

Thanks!

[veremin]

We have re-verified the behavior of deleted items retention on our end and found no dependencies on the policy configured at the Capacity Tier level. Whether in move or copy mode, it operated consistently, cleaning up unnecessary data on the Capacity Tier.

Therefore, I recommend that you contact your engineer to inform them that the information provided was not entirely accurate. Alternatively, you can escalate your ticket by using the "Talk to Manager" button.

Thanks!

[jcofin13]

Thank you for testing this. i

I just had a look at the closed case and these were the notes that were left with links:

The thought is that due to the move setting on the Capacity Tier none of the removed VM have a copy on the local storage to be removed from the performance tier for the Deleted VM setting. As such the SOBR tiering job does not remove the VM retore points that only reside on Capacity Tier.

Background Retention - User Guide for VMware vSphere: (link https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=120)

[For backups stored in the capacity tier] Background retention job does not delete capacity tier copies of backup data directly. However, if background retention removes local copies of backups, they may also be marked for removal on the capacity tier. In such a case, cleanup during the next SOBR offloading session will remove them from the capacity tier.

I guess if you are saying it should clean it up and my ticket suggests that i should manually delete it, i can reopen the ticket and see if i can continue troubleshooting. I appreciate you testing on your end. I guess im not to excited to spend more time on something that should be so simple.

[veremin]

Yes, I would recommend reopening your ticket, stating that the information provided in it is not entirely accurate, and that the QA team has rechecked the product behavior and confirmed that the deleted items retention works regardless of the policy set on the Capacity Tier.

You might want to escalate the ticket to a higher tier to expedite the investigation process.

Thanks!