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rhnb
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Remove old VMs from backup

Post by rhnb »

Hi
I've been looking around on the forum to try and find a way of removing old clients from my backups but nothing seems to work.

I have a particular backup job which is a 'folder' based backup. In that there are currently 35 VM's.
A few months ago, there were 40 VM's - so, 5 VM's have been removed from the backup process. They are of course still visible in the Backups.
Is there any way I can delete the entries for these 5 VM's? I've seen the posts about 'Perform a full backup' on the group, but how would that work?? And anyway, this particular group does a full backup once a week anyway.
At this rate, these VM's will stay there for ever - is that correct??? We have quite a few developers here, so VM's are coming and going pretty regularly.

Any help much appreciated.

And as a 'wish'. Can we not have a 'calendar based' rather than 'count' retention? Seems much more logical to me. I'm asked to keep data for 'n' weeks/months/years, not 'n' backups.

Cheeers... allan.
Gostev
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Re: Remove old VMs from backup

Post by Gostev »

Correct, you just select the job and choose "Perform full backup". This would create the new VBK file which only contains actual VMs. This is the only way to do it today, however the upcoming v5 release will provide automatic VM-level retention, so the cleanup will happen automatically.

We changed count retention to calendar retention in v4, but based on beta feedback we rolled back this change. After our customers have seen what CBT does for backup window, many of them made decision to make backup a few times per day, so calendar based retention did not work well (did not provide sufficient granularity - especially for near-CDP replication). We agreed count is more universal approach, until we introduce more complex retention policy.

Thanks!
rhnb
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Re: Remove old VMs from backup

Post by rhnb »

Sorry, I must be being thick here...

I have a group GROUP1 which has been backing up for a few months and under 'Backups' when I look at it it contains 40VM's - VM1-VM40
VM's 1-5 are old and no longer required.
So, I perform a full backup of GROUP1 (as I said, I perform a full backup every week anyway).
I fail to see how this clears out those old VM's. I definitely need to keep all the other 35 VMs and all their restore points.

Does the 'Perform Full Backup' behave differently to 'doing a full backup in a schedule'?

I'm a bit paranoid about doing this. There are other VM's in there which no longer exist but which I wish to keep for a few weeks/months longer, in case I'm asked to resurrect them. I guess Perform Full Backup will zap those too?

I'd assumed there would be a very simple 'right click the VM in the backup group list and select delete'.

Can you expand on "however the upcoming v5 release will provide automatic VM-level retention, so the cleanup will happen automatically." How does that work? If it's not time based, it's count based and as the count won;t increment ('cos they're not there anymore) how will it know when to remove those backups? Wouldn't it just be much easier to have a 'right-click - Delete' option to remove old VM's from backups?

Thanks for the info re the 'calendar based' retention. Shame about that.

Cheers... Allan.
Gostev
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Re: Remove old VMs from backup

Post by Gostev »

You will keep the other 35 VMs and all their restore points in the old VBK file, as "Perform full backup" will create new VBK file. The new VBK will not have those 5 VMs included.

Manual "Perform full backup" is no different from one performed on schedule.

In v5, the same "count" retention policy which applies to backup (VRB) files, will also apply to individual VMs. After VM is gone from the job settings, it will remain in the backup file for the specified count of cycles, and then its data will be removed automatically. Right-click > Delete option is also available.
rhnb
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Re: Remove old VMs from backup

Post by rhnb »

Right OK - roll on version 5!
Bunce
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Re: Remove old VMs from backup

Post by Bunce »

Gostev wrote:You will keep the other 35 VMs and all their restore points in the old VBK file, as "Perform full backup" will create new VBK file. The new VBK will not have those 5 VMs included.

Manual "Perform full backup" is no different from one performed on schedule.

In v5, the same "count" retention policy which applies to backup (VRB) files, will also apply to individual VMs. After VM is gone from the job settings, it will remain in the backup file for the specified count of cycles, and then its data will be removed automatically. Right-click > Delete option is also available.
hi gostev.

So are the new retention policy features still only going to be based on count? I don't think this reflects common use case scenarios. The actual number of backups is not important - its when they were taken that is the key.

Why not base it on actual retention policies which are almost always based on tiers? I.e. maintain x backups per week for x weeks, then months, then years.

This would be probably be uniform across all backup jobs therefore only one policy would ber required, whereas if based on count we're going to have to manually go and change per vm retention settings for vm's on different schedules.
Bunce
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Re: Remove old VMs from backup

Post by Bunce »

An example of the above.

In the attached below, you can see a timeline of all backups taken. It reflects a retention policy where we've elected to maintain:
  • 1 Backup per day - (auto-purging begins after 14 days)
  • 2 Backups per week - (auto-purging begins after 4 weeks)
  • 1 Backup per month - (auto-purging begins after 3 months)
This reflects the fact that restorations are less likely to be required as they get older.

The last diagram shows the related settings for this. Veeam effectively already maintains an 'appliance' of multiple VM backups in its VBR/VBK files and so the architecture is in place.

We found the 'timeline' screen shot below was very effective in giving us a holistic view of what restore points we had available across all VM's. Its something that can be presented to managers etc to indicate how backups are progressing and makes it very easy to drill-down to particular VM's.

I think this type of report would be invaluable as part of Veeam Enterprise Manageger. :D

Image

Image

Image

Cheers,
A

PS. Hope its OK to post these screenshots - I thought it more appropriate than posting links directly to other products manuals/blogs etc. Just wanting to make Veeam an even better product! :lol:
Gostev
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Re: Remove old VMs from backup

Post by Gostev »

Bunce wrote:Why not base it on actual retention policies which are almost always based on tiers?
It is not a question of "why" but "when" :wink:
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