When does retention kick in?

[xmzmc]

Hi,

Previously our Veeam Backup server talked directly to our ESXi host but i recently changed that so Veeam talks to vCenter instead. Besides adding vCenter to Veeam, the VM backups also had to be fully redone due to changing MorefID and i had to re-add the VM's to our jobs. I did all of this one by one so 1 VM each day.

Everything is done through vCenter now and that part is done, however, I have big retention issues. I have:
- Backup job 1 to local backup repository. Type: VMWare backup. Retention: 7 days, Remove deleted data: 7 days, Full synthetic: every friday.
- Backup job 2 to local backup repository. Type: VMWare backup. Retention: 7 days, Remove deleted data: 7 days, Full synthetic: every thursday.
- Backup copy job 1 to offsite backup repository. Type: backup copy.
- Backup copy job 2 to offsite backup repository. Type: backup copy.
Now the problem is that old restore points aren't getting cleaned up on the local backup repository. I have no orphaned backups which is good but when i go to Backups > Disk i see a lot of restore points from over 23+ days. Some even way higher like 39 days. This makes us run out of disk space on the local backup repository. I know Veeam can't comply exactly to the configured retention period due to the incremental nature but I thought that doing full synthetic backups makes it so old restore points do get deleted but that doesn't seem to happen.

Last week i had to manually delete a big VM from Backups > Disk because Veeam didn't have enough room to make backups anymore.
- Are the problems caused because i re-added the VM's, one each day?
- Is having so much old restore points expected?
- When is retention and restore point cleanup supposed to kick in in my setup?

[david.domask]

Hi xmzmc,

Retention will be applied as described here in the User Guide for Forward Incremental Chains.

If you are seeing that retention is not being applied as per the documentation, then sounds like a technical issue, so please open a Support Case and let Veeam Support review the debug logs. It's possible there's a misconfiguration or an unexpected issue, but a review of the logs with Veeam Support is best path forward.

Please share your case number once created, thanks!

[xmzmc]

Thank you for your reply. Yeah i'm somewhat familiar with these retention and cleanup mechanics and according to the article the retention cleanup should've already happened due to the full synthetics but maybe i'm misunderstanding or overlooking something.

Either way, just to be sure: those offsite Backup copy job's, which have a different retention, shouldn't interfere or affect the retention and retention cleanup of the local backups jobs, correct?

[david.domask]

Correct, Backup Copy jobs are completely separate backups from the source (primary) backups they copy from. Backup Copy jobs are not simple file copies, but instead data within the source backups is read out to create a completely new and independent backup managed by the Backup Copy job's retention.