How to Cleanly Delete Backups Manually

[tthomas1@ebsco.com]

Hello,

I have a nightly backup that runs full on Fridays, incremental all other days of the week, and a 14 day retention. This sometimes turns into a ~20 day retention since the oldest chain has to be removed all at once. Somehow, it is now retaining 34 days' worth of backups and there is no space for the currently running full backup job from last Friday. The job is stalled. It appears that a full backup was missed back in December somehow, and it caused the chain to be two weeks long. Regardless, I want to delete that chain to free up space. What is the clean way to do that in Veeam B&R? I'm nervous about using "Delete from Disk" as I can't find documentation indicating whether or not you can choose individual backup chains for deletion.

[DGrinev]

Hi Tim,

You can manually delete the oldest backup chain (full backup file + increments), then you will be able to use Forget function within UI.

Thanks!

[tthomas1@ebsco.com]

Thank you for the quick reply! Unfortunately when I right-click the backup in the dialog box, I don't get a right-click menu. I tried this on several backups and got nothing. I should note this isn't a Backup Copy, it's a standard Backup so I don't know if that matters. Also, I don't have any *missing* restore points like the article describes, so that may be an issue as well. Any other ideas?

[DGrinev]

Sorry for the confusion!
I've missed that we're talking about the Agent jobs. Is it a backup job or policy for a managed Agent?

Accidentally I gave the link about Copy job, but here is the similar for Backup Jobs.

Thanks!

[tthomas1@ebsco.com]

No problem! I appreciate the help. I've now opened a case but maybe you can provide the answer sooner! This is a standard backup job managed from Veeam Backup & Replication.

[DGrinev]

Are you looking at Backups -> Disk -> right-click on the Backup Job -> Properties?

[tthomas1@ebsco.com]

Yes.

[DGrinev]

It should be possible to open the context menu, but I cannot troubleshoot the issue through the forum.
Please keep working with the support team and share the case ID here so we can track it internally.

Thank you!

[tthomas1@ebsco.com]

Will do! Thanks DGrinev.

[Egor Yakovlev]

Hi Tim,
- make sure backup files are manually deleted from the disk (that old part of a chain you want to get rid of, aka full part Full(vbk)+chained Incrementals(vib))
- make sure to rescan Repository in UI (Backup Infrastructure - Backup Repositories - right click - Rescan). That should allow Veeam to detect missing restore points and mark them respectfully in the UI.
- now check the missing backups are marked under Home - Backups - Disk - properties and right click menu to Forget will be available.
/Cheers!

[tthomas1@ebsco.com]

Thanks Egor! I've had a case open for a couple of days now, 03963590. Unfortunately it's been a much bigger pain to resolve than I would have expected. The job was still running so I had to first stop the existing job gracefully which took several hours. Then I moved the oldest backup chain into a subfolder and rescanned, but it got stuck on the subfolder. I then moved the subfolder elsewhere so the rescan wouldn't see it. This time the rescan worked and I deleted the older backup chain, however the rescan saw the backup job as a brand new job for some reason. I didn't catch the implications and kicked off a new backup, and it started a whole new backup folder. I'm now two hours into trying to cancel this new backup so I can map the existing backup back to the job again.

[Egor Yakovlev]

Update: case has been solved with Support Team guidance.
Chains are clear, retention applied and everything is in line!
/Cheers!

[tthomas1@ebsco.com]

Yes indeed, we finally got it cleaned up. One thing I learned was that "14 days retention" actually means "14 BACKUPS retention". That's good to know considering our full backup runs on Friday night into Monday morning, so "14 days" is actually "18 days". I actually reduced retention settings to 13 days which resolves my issue by causing older chains to get deleted at the right time. I believe in a couple of weeks I can change it back to 14.