Manual deletion of organizations from blob/object storage

[pat_ren]

I have a tricky situation where I have a blob storage repo I've inherited with about 300TB of 365 backup data in it going back 7 years, this consists of many organisations (all in one big repo (I know)) and is used for historical data and restores only, all live and current backup data now lives on a different server and goes to individual buckets in object storage, this is old legacy stuff. Having spent some time inspecting the data, a lot of it doesn't need to be there as it related to old orgs which are no longer backed up and have been removed from Veeam completely. I've tried to clean this up using methods I know such as looping through get-vboentitydata and remove-vboentitydata, which is tricky as the orgs have been removed from Veeam, but not impossible to find all objects related to an org, however deleting these doesn't always work.

I've also tried this script which seems to have similar issues in not being able to remove some data.
https://github.com/VeeamHub/powershell/ ... sitory.ps1

Some orgs which I remove appear successful and 99% of data is successfully removed, other orgs seem to leave several TB behind that doesn't seem possible to remove.

I want to know if I can just delete the org from Veeam > Backup365 > Clients > Organizations > (OrgID) directly in the storage container? If I never need to use these orgs again, are they safe to delete, or will this break the repository for any other orgs which remain? It's simple to determine which org IDs in the storage relate to which org names I want to delete, so I know exactly what I need to delete, but I am hesitant to do it in case I end up with an invalid repo or something, it will save me a lot of money each month in storage fees if I can wipe these out.

To summarise there's over 100 orgs and 300TB of data in a single storage container/object repo and I just want to completely remove some old orgs which no longer exist in Veeam (and can't be put back), which are using large amounts of storage, and only keep about half of them which I still care about.

Let me know the best way to do this please. Thanks.

[Mildur]

Hello Pat,

We don't support manual interaction directly with object storage. In theory, it might work, but there are other objects that also contain the organization ID. Because this method is unsupported, I can't give you a definitive recommendation. But I suggest contacting our customer support team for a guided, one-time cleanup of your repository.

Some orgs which I remove appear successful and 99% of data is successfully removed, other orgs seem to leave several TB behind that doesn't seem possible to remove.

Does your Azure Blob repository perhaps have Blob versioning and immutability enabled?

Best regards,
Fabian

[pat_ren]

Hello Pat,

We don't support manual interaction directly with object storage. In theory, it might work, but there are other objects that also contain the organization ID. Because this method is unsupported, I can't give you a definitive recommendation. But I suggest contacting our customer support team for a guided, one-time cleanup of your repository.


Does your Azure Blob repository perhaps have Blob versioning and immutability enabled?

Best regards,
Fabian

Hi Fabian,

Thanks for your reply, no versioning or immutability, most of this data is a few years old from before my time, it just seems like some stuff can't be cleaned up properly built-in commands. Just looking for other options as this residual storage is costing us a decent amount each month we probably don't need to pay. I'll log a support case and see what they think.

Cheers,
Pat

[bryanvaneeden]

Any update on this? We are looking into the same thing where we want to delete data from a repository on S3 storage. I just want a toggle that says "Do you want to remove the data while deleting the repository?".

[Polina]

Hi Bryan,

There's no update, and tbh such functionality is not foreseen.

If you need to remove some of the backed up data from a repository, please use the Remove-VBOEntityData cmdlet.

If you're removing the entire repository and want to delete all backed up data along with it, please do it directly in object storage after the reposiory is removed from the VB365 scope.

Thanks!