Veeam Backup & Replication 6.0
VMWare vCenter Server 4.1
New Veeam admin here.
My backups have been failing recently due to very low disk space. Currently I have only 208KB free on a 1.5TB drive. I am not able to increase the disk size. There is only one backup job (backing up several VMs). I first tried to delete (move) the oldest modified .VIB file (freeing ~80GB) but Veeam complained that it needed to write to that file, backup failed. I lowered the number of Restore Points to keep on disk from 5 to 4 but that did not help.
Basically, I'm wondering if there is a way to "free up" some backup files? I just about to the point of deleting everything and recreating the job the way I want it but I would rather not go that route.
You can delete all backups that are older than the latest VBK you have. But if you only have a single full backup chain on this disk, then there is nothing you can do...
If you talk about vib, you are using forward incremental mode. So a way to use less space would be to change the backup mode to reverse incremental, so you will have to hold only one full backup file.
Luca.
Luca Dell'Oca Principal EMEA Cloud Architect @ Veeam Software
I already tried to delete older files but when the job ran next it failed complaining that it could not write to the file that I deleted. It was a .VIB file. I have attached a screenshot of my current file chain if you're curious.
I use forward incremental mode because I am backing up Netware servers and it was highly recommended to use that mode.
I was able to increase the mapped LUN in order for my volume to have more space. The backup ran "better" in that about 75% of my VMs appeared to backup successfully but I eventually ran out of space yet again. I increased the mapped LUN yet again (twice as much as the last increase) in hopes that the job will complete tonight and process the change I made to the number of restore points to keep (I changed from 5 to 4 restore points).
If I end up running out of space yet again tonight I may just delete everything and start over with a "new" job.
oubeaver wrote:I already tried to delete older files but when the job ran next it failed complaining that it could not write to the file that I deleted. It was a .VIB file.
Most probably this VIB was created after the latest full.
Insignificant increase of the LUN size could probably not help a lot with forward incremental mode as depending on the day of the week it could require several full backups to be stored on disk. If you have retention set to 4 restore points and run the job daily, you still have to keep the previous week's full until the number of restore points created during the current week reaches 4 (so until that moment you need two fulls stored on disk). Please review this topic for more detailed explanation on how this mode works. So going with reverse incremental mode is more preferable in lack of disk space conditions as more or less fixed disk space size is required (one full and the required number of rollbacks).
if there's such a small amount of restore points and you're confident that the VM's are stable I would bite the bullet and disable the job, delete the files and kick off a new reverse incremental job from this point - one backup tonight means your not far of your retention policy... if you have a USB hard disk drive you could put those files on there (or another network location) temporarily
Gostev wrote:You can delete all backups that are older than the latest VBK you have. But if you only have a single full backup chain on this disk, then there is nothing you can do...
Will deleting older VBK's as advised affect the number of restore's available? I use the Reverse Incremental method.
With reversed incremental mode, the most recent restore point is always full backup, which previous VRB restore points are based on. You can safely remove any older fulls without affecting the ability to restore from the most recent set of backups (VBK+VRB's), or you can remove some older VRB files to save some space, but make sure you keep a contiguous chain of backups up to the most recent full. You will not be able to restore from deleted restore points, of course.
