delete latest restore point?

[babbtong]

Hello,
I've done some research and I know that the best way to delete a restore point is to shorten the retention period. However, I'm using a forward incremental scheme and need to delete yesterday's backup restore point. We have jobs seperated by OS, but the VCenter got added to a job instead of the server that it's residing on, so the job backed up all 300 of our VMs and took up about 5 TB. I need to get back some of the space, so I was trying to see if there is a way to delete that one restore point?

[PTide]

Hi,

Do you want to delete the whole restore point or just some VMs?

[babbtong]

ideally the whole restore point. is it even possible to delete a couple vms? I thought it wasn't

[PTide]

Correct, it's not possible, sorry for confusion.

The best option would be to delete that last restore point from chain completely and disable your backup job. Then create another job, add all VMs needed and start your chain anew. Delete old job's backups when needed and keep going with your new job.

The reason why to start chain anew is that if you delete a restore point from the chain then your job will fail due to the absence of the restore point while it's still present in a metadata.

Thank you.

[babbtong]

Great to know there's a procedure! Is there somewhere I can see written documentation on this? Like, how do I delete the last restore point? Do you mean manually delete the file? And when you say start the chain anew, you mean a new full kickoff? Is it not possible to have veeam resume the incremental chain somehow?

[Vitaliy S.]

Deleting the restore point manually is highly not recommended, please take a look at this topic > Delete Restore Points

If you still need to delete that point, your backup job will run active full backup for VMs (you can trigger that manually) that are added to the backup job > Force reverse incremental after failed active full

[babbtong]

Thank you! We decided the best way is to just increase the space on the landing disk marginally and keep an eye on it until the retention period passes. This is an unrelated question, but one of our jobs is not following the retention period. The period is set for 14 days, but the backups go back 32 restore points. We have it set for forever forward incrementals, with synthetic fulls occurring every saturday. I notice that between 9/13 and 10/4, there are no full backup files. I'm not sure why. Do you know what's going on?

[foggy]

forever forward incrementals, with synthetic fulls occurring every saturday.

Forever forward incremental cannot have periodic fulls (it is forever incremental!). Once you enable periodic fulls (either active or synthetic), the job switches to normal forward incremental.

I notice that between 9/13 and 10/4, there are no full backup files. I'm not sure why. Do you know what's going on?

Check whether the job was actually started on Saturdays in between. Do you probably use chained jobs?

[babbtong]

Forever forward incremental cannot have periodic fulls (it is forever incremental!). Once you enable periodic fulls (either active or synthetic), the job switches to normal forward incremental.

Duh, that makes sense! Thanks for the clarification!

Check whether the job was actually started on Saturdays in between. Do you probably use chained jobs?

I'm not sure what you mean by chained jobs? Of course, the night after I post the question, the job goes back and removes the old backup files per the retention policy. I'm not sure if the job was started on the Saturdays in between, but I know that the job has been running everyday including Saturdays since the first full after the outdated backups. Not sure why it just now decided to remove the old restore points all of a sudden. I did upgrade from v7 to v8 yesterday, with the latest hotfix. Is there anything in the upgrade/update that could have addressed this? Just don't want this to happen again in the future.

[foggy]

Most likely older restore points could not be deleted earlier since the new chain hadn't reached the required number of restore points. (which has happened last night).

By the chained job I mean the job that is scheduled to start after some other job has completed (chained to it). Anyway, you can keep an eye on how retention will work from this point on and contact support in case something looks unexpected.

[Nick_Sher]

Hi, every one.
I use Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 to backup my Vmware infrastructure. I have a problem : I back up exchange server 2016 and have 14 restore points, but last restore point is incomplete status. I use Forward incremental method without full and synthetic backup.
Last back up occured unsuccessfully.
Now I want to delete this restore point. How to do this correctly? I don't want my backup chan will crushed.
Reduce the number of restore point? but I need delete exactly the new restore point(last increment).
Make new full is very difficult and problematic: insufficient repository free space.
Size of Exhange is about 8 TB.
What I have to do???

[Natalia Lupacheva]

Hi Nick,

I've moved your question to the existing thread with discussion on similar issues.
Please take a look at this step-by-step instruction and the description what you have to do in general.
If you do not succeed with this instruction please contact Support to fix the problem with the last restore point deletion in your certain case.

Thanks!

[foggy]

In your place, I would simply leave it as is as the incomplete restore point should be repaired during the next job run and the data that was not completely transferred will be copied over (unless the failure reason was lack of space, but in this case, you would anyway need to release it to complete the job successfully).