Deleting VIB's

[bhagen]

Well, I messed up...I have an agent for windows (server edition) job on one of my physical servers set for 8 restore points and a full every week. Except I just discovered I actually set it to do fulls once a month.

Now I have an 8.2TB vbk with 30 vib's, and a more recent 8.2TB vbk with 1 vib.

I'd like to reclaim that 8.2TB; it's almost filled up my backup repository!

Interestingly, the vib's only total about 500Gb...not much change in a month, apparently.

How do I "fix" this issue?

[Dima P.]

Hi bhagen,

Is it possible to set the retention in the job to lower value and start incremental job run? This should force retired backup chain to be deleted.

[bhagen]

Hi bhagen,

Is it possible to set the retention in the job to lower value and start incremental job run? This should force retired backup chain to be deleted.

I did this (I set the retention to 7); all that happened is that there is now another VBK with now a couple more VIBs...none of the old chain got deleted. There are now 44 items in that folder.

I *need* to get this folder paired down, should I open a ticket?

[Dima P.]

bhagen,

How old is the latest increment in the ‘old’ backup chain? Thanks.

[bhagen]

bhagen,

How old is the latest increment in the ‘old’ backup chain? Thanks.

Latest increment is on 8-6. Here's a list of some of the files. Can I not post a screenshot here?

8-14 .vbm file 846kb
8-11 7:40pm .vib file 2.7Mb
8-11 6:35pm .vib file 18.3Mb
8-11 2:42am .vib file 29.7Mb
8-10 1:32am .vbk file 8.28TB
8-6 727pm .vib file 1.1Mb
8-6 4:17am .vib file 24.8Mb
8-5 1:23am .vib file 19.1Mb
.
.
.
6-16 10:24am .vbk file 8.20TB

[bhagen]

I finally submitted a ticket to Veeam, and the conclusion is that I'm stuck. The Veeam agent won't tolerate the deletion of vib files; the whole chain goes corrupt. What I *should* have done was set the retention lower, uncheck the synthetic and the periodic active full boxes (changing the chain to forever forward incrementals), and let the next incremental backup occur. That would have decreased the vibs to the lower setting and updated the single vbk file, and deleted the other vbk and vib files.

Instead, I wrongly ran an active full. Now I don't have space to keep the old and new vbk files and 7 vibs for the new vbk.

So I'm going to have to spin up some more storage, point my backups to the new storage until I get the retention I want, and then I can delete the now old files.

The problem is, now I have to decrease the retention of several of my other backups so I don't fill up the repository before I can delete this 17TB folder.

Ugh. Well, live and learn I guess!