Force Aging Out of Old Restore Points

[Artaheri]

Hi, am I correct in thinking the only way to remove older restore points (or any restore points) in a backup chain is to adjust the retention period and run a new backup?

We have a situation where we changed cloud providers and switched from mutable to immutable capacity tiers. Because we couldn't mix these in the same SOBR, we created new SOBRs and new backup jobs, and have left the existing backup data orphaned on the old capacity tier for possible restoration until we get enough restore points in the new SOBRs.

Ideally, I would like to age out the old restore points month by month to reduce our usage, but I assume the only way I could do this was to have the backup job be active.

It would be great if we could run some kind of "cleanup" job that only handles cleaning up old retention points, without backing up any fresh data. I am guessing that if I manually delete the restore point data in the repo, it would just screw up the chain and make it unusable.

Thanks for any clarification on this.

[Mildur]

Hello Artaheri

Correct, you cannot remove single restore points manually via the backup console or PowerShell.
Manually deleting objects on object storage is not supported. Those objects may belong to restore points you still want to keep.

Cleaning up restore points on capacity tier requires an active SOBR. If you have kept your old SOBR, the 4 hourly offload session should take care of the restore point removal accordingly to the specified retention setting.

Ideally, I would like to age out the old restore points month by month to reduce our usage, but I assume the only way I could do this was to have the backup job be active.

If you have kept your old SOBR (performance and capacity tier), our background retention job will take care of deleting the old (GFS) restore points:
https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=120

Best,
Fabian

[Artaheri]

Hi Mildur, thanks for replying, that's perfect. I'll monitor the background retention to look for those offloads; I assumed that with the jobs no longer running nothing would change, so good to know that the background retention job still operates on the capacity tier.

I assume if I wanted to change the GFS settings, that would require running the backup job again? Or could I change the GFS settings and leave the backup job disabled?