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wilh
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How do you preserve older backups when a new backup fails?

Post by wilh »

To cut the story short, I had an extra server running a few VMs that I didn't really care about too much... Veeam was backing everything up on a regular job - Daily, 3 restore points to keep, incremental and it was working without issue.

For the last few days, my backup reports show that a few VMs were skipped due to an error (which I'm trying to resolve separately). I ignored this, because I thought my backups were safe and these servers really aren't that important at all.

Today, I wanted to dig a little deeper and I'm in a bit of shock really... going to restore, expanding a backup job and selecting a VM shows that the last backup was less than a day ago:

Image

However, if I then select this VM and look at points, it has deleted all but the oldest (And I think some VMs are missing altogether):

Image

Other VMs are working as expected and I've never had any issues with Veeam. I'm sure this is down to me not following best practices, but, this is a weird one and I just wondered if anyone has seen this and can advise if I am doing something wrong here as surely if I set x points, it shouldn't delete the points if a backup hasn't run?
foggy
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Re: How do you preserve older backups when a new backup fails?

Post by foggy »

Hi William, that doesn't sound right, indeed. Have you contacted technical support already? What backup method does that job use - forward or forever forward incremental? What is the deleted VMs retention for this job? And what was the particular error message causing the job to skip those VMs?
wilh
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Re: How do you preserve older backups when a new backup fails?

Post by wilh »

Hi Foggy,

Firstly, not sure why the images are missing above - the links should be https://imgur.com/a/ofQFrqb for the first, and, https://imgur.com/a/vzjWjXU for the second.

Next, I haven't contacted technical support as to me, this feels quite silly and I can't believe it is intended to work this way, so, I'm almost certain I'm not following best practices or I've done something wrong rather than it being a defect/bug. (Although, I can't understand what's going on in my pictures above!).

The settings I have under storage is "Restore points to keep on disk: 3", under advanced > Backup, I just have "Incremental (recommended)", under advanced > Storage, I have the 3 recommendations ticked . Under Vsphere I have the two CBT checkboxes ticked and lastly "Enable backup from storage snapshots" under integration.

Everything else is unticked.

If you have any advice, it would be greatly appreciated!
foggy
Veeam Software
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Re: How do you preserve older backups when a new backup fails?

Post by foggy »

It is still not clear if you have any periodic fulls enabled (either active or synthetic) and what is the retention setting for the deleted VMs (Advanced > Maintenance tab). Also, you haven't shared the exact failure reason. Investigation of such issues via forum messages ping-pong is not very effective, our support engineers would be able to look at your configuration during a remote session and define the reason for such behavior.
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