Job failed -> restore points deleted

[RSchmoelzer]

Hi,

At a customer site we have several jobs/vm´s which are backuped to a NAS.
Due to a configuration error in vCenter (not veeams fault ) the backups failed.
No big deal, but we found another, much bigger, problem which seems related to veeam.
The restore points have been deleted from the NAS, one every day!!!

So even if the backup job says "Restore points to keep on disk:" it looks like veeam
wipes the restore points based on "number of backup job cycles".

In this case you could easily end up without any backups at all, if you dont check your logs frequently.
Would´nt it be better to wipe the old restore point AFTER the backup job was successful, not at beginning?
Of course this would take more diskspace during the backup job.

What would you think?
regards
Robert

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Robert,

Would´nt it be better to wipe the old restore point AFTER the backup job was successful, not at beginning?

This is exactly how our retention policy works, retention policy is applied at the end of the job run, and only if it completes successfully. As a result, you will always have the specified amount of good restore points available (even if you have months of failing backups).

So even if the backup job says "Restore points to keep on disk:" it looks like veeam wipes the restore points based on "number of backup job cycles".

Yes, every job cycle creates a new restore point, and we do keep track of these restore points based on the settings you define.

How did you set your retention policy for this job? By the way what is the backup mode you use?

Thanks.

[RSchmoelzer]

Hello Vitaly,

Thanks for your quick reply!

Here are the job parameters:
Processing mode -> virtual appliance
backup dest -> \\192.168.x.y\veeam\backups
restore points to keep -> 15
Deleted VMs retention period -> 7
reversed incremental
inline dedupe -> enabled
Compression -> optimal
Storage -> LAN target
use CBT -> enabled for all processed VMs
Integrity checks -> enabled
application-aware image proc -> enabled
guest file sys indexing -> enabled
guest OS credentials -> provided
Run the job -> 21:00 on all days except sunday
retry failes -> 3 times
wait -> 10min

It would also be very helpful if we could "export", "backup" and "copy/paste" the jobs settings.

regards
Robert

[Vitaliy S.]

The restore points have been deleted from the NAS, one every day!!!

This is exactly how it should work. Retention policy for reversed incremental backup mode shows you how many restore points you would have after each job run, so if you're using a daily job schedule then after each run retention policy will remove the oldest restore point.

It would also be very helpful if we could "export", "backup" and "copy/paste" the jobs settings.

We are planning to add this functionality down the road.

[RSchmoelzer]

So, if everything is correct what could have gone wrong, why did it wipe the restore points?
The problem on the vCenter server occured after a migration of the (virtual) vCenter VM to another host.
From this moment veeam could`nt login to vCenter any more and the jobs timed out.

regards
Robert

[Vitaliy S.]

Veeam Backup server couldn't wipe out all your restore points. In order to verify that a corresponding job log needs to be reviewed, so please contact our support team for assistance with this. Also please avoid posting log snippets on the forums, as requested when you click New Topic. Thanks!