Reclaim disk space when reducing restore points

[SmokinJoe]

Hi All,

I was running out of disk space so I tried to make some changes and add 1tb more of storage, it never worked.

I changed these settings :
1) Retention policy 28 days - 4 days
2) Create synthetic full backups periodically : Saturday - Off
3) Remove Deleted items data after : 7 days - 3days

From the Veeam Backup & Replication Console I could delete from disk the jobs and it would NOT show I had more disk space in windows file explorer. I had to schedule a job to "Preform backup files health check" and then the next day I could "Delete from disk" the backups to actually get disk space back. I ended up deleting ALL my backups. Is there a powershell command that I can run that would "Preform backup files health check" and "Defragment and compact full backup file" so I do not have to have these scheduled to run once a week. I would like to do this to verify the data is happy.

I am running VEEAM Community edition : 10.0.1.4854
I am running vCenter: 5.5.0 Build 9548700
I am running VMware : 5.5.0 Build 9919047
I am running Windows Server 2016 : Version 1607 OS Build 14393.3986

Thanks,
Joe

[PetrM]

Hello,

"Job" and "Backup" are completely different entities: the first one is a set of settings applied to a group of objects you're backing up, in other words it means "how to create backup". The second one implies a set of restore points created by "Job". Therefore, you will not gain space if you delete "Job" as backup files remain untouched.

The behavior of "Delete from disk" is not related to backup file maintenance settings like health-check so it's not expected to see any kind of dependency between them.

The "Delete from disk" option must not be used on regular basis, it's necessary only if you want to remove a specific backup. The restore points are removed according to retention policy settings, please refer to this section of our help center, you will find the examples for each backup chain type. I assume that in your case the obsolete restore points were not removed because the latest chain did not contain the necessary number of restore points specified in retention policy settings.

If you see the behavior which differ from the described one, then I'd suggest to contact our support team and paste a support case ID over here.

Thanks!

[foggy]

Basically, job retention applies at the end of the successful job run, not right after you change the job settings. If you need to free up space immediately, you can manually delete the old part of the chain (full + depending increments) and then use the forget missing restore points functionality to clean up the database.

Answering your other question, currently, there's no ability to perform a health check or defragment/compact operation separately from the job schedule.

[SmokinJoe]

Thanks Foggy, that answers my question 100% correctly. I think the software developers could do this so we don't have to do some shady file system delete but I bet management said leave the issue in place so we can force some support calls.

For my situation if I would have known this I think I could have deleted 1 server from the set of servers backed up, reduce the retention and allow veeam to reduce what was on disk and everyone would have been happy.

[foggy]

You would anyway have to have enough space for the job to finish, even with that VM temporarily excluded. The best practice is to use built-in space notifications (or better Veeam ONE reporting) to avoid the situations when the job fails due to lack of space.