Delete files, folders from within Backups

[davecla]

Hello Team Veeam,

Is there anyway to delete files / folders from within backups - leaving the rest of the backup intact?

Have semi frequent need for remove selected information from backups (court ordered).

Any ideas?

Ideally it could be actioned programmatically and I could get a dev to wrap some code around to automate the process.

thanks
Dave

[Gostev]

Hi, Dave.

Basically, you can exclude files and folders during backup, but not after backup has been created (since it's an image-level, and not a file-level backup).

Best you can do is "ugly workarounds". One way to achieve this would be to spin up each restore point that you want to keep with Instant VM Recovery, delete the required files from the running system, and make another backup of this instantly recovered VM (for example, with VeeamZIP). All of this can be done programmatically. Once you're done creating the restore new backups, you should simply delete all the original backups.

I will take a note of this use case for the future versions (zeroing out content of selected files in all restore points). In theory, it should be doable - but it is not an easy feature to implement for sure. Also, the whole process will probably still require a very long time to complete (as we would need to mount each and every restore point) - but, at least it will be fully automated.

Thanks!

[chrisdearden]

I suppose its the opposite of "legal hold" - more of a "legal purge"

[Jekit]

Hello
Do you have news about this request ?
Our servers host data from multiple clients.
We would like to delete a specific folder (example: SERVER / DISK / Client / XXX)
Is there a Veeam tool or partner product to help us automate this?

[foggy]

Hi Jeremy, you cannot delete any data from the backup files. But could you please elaborate on your request - is the "right to be forgotten"-related by any chance?

[pesos]

We are in the same boat as the OP - facing a legal issue where documents were disclosed in error to our legal team and now need to be purged from our systems entirely. Any update on this kind of functionality?

Thank you.

[Gostev]

No updates John. There has been very few requests for this functionality in the past years, as you can see from the dates of posts this thread. Thanks!

[pesos]

Good to know. Definitely something to keep in mind when deciding whether or not to use per-vm backup files!

Thanks!

[it2018]

Is there any feature, or planned feature to be able to selectively delete files/folders from a backup or backup chain.
Occasionally the need arises due to client contract requirements that we remove all data after the project completion.

We're currently moving to using Veeam, and with our current software we would have to exclude the folder at the start then create a new job specifically for that. Does Veeam have any way of deleting from the backups rather than having to do this exclude/separate job method?

I appreciate it's a slightly odd requirement to want to delete from backups though I would think possibly more common with GDPR rules these days.

[wishr]

Hi Chris,

You can modify your job and exclude certain folders/files/file types from a job at any point, but not from the existing backups.

I've moved your post to an existing thread covering the same topic - please take a look.

Regards,
Fedor

[cookiejc]

HI, I Just wanted to ask the same question really and found this thread. We work in government and use Veeam, with various government rules around data handling and the newish GDPR regulations, being able to remove individual files from existing backups would be a key requirement when we re assess our backup solution. I imagine every organization will face this issue. What do you do if a right to be forgotten request requires you to delete individual files from backup relating to an individual?

[Gostev]

Hello, backups themselves cannot be modified due to being image-level. However, even with file-level backups, attempting to remove individual records from within application database files on the binary level will corrupt the database - while removing the entire database file is rarely an option.

However, GDPR does not require removing data from backups either. And in fact, there are other existing regulations which require backups to be immutable. Otherwise, for example, criminals would be able to just erase the history of their crimes by requesting to remove their name from all records including ones associated with money laundering, making further investigations impossible.

What a GDPR's right to be forgotten requires is that personal data is not restored from backups back to the production environment, where it will become the part of production workflows like marketing emails. For this, we provide Staged Restore functionality to make required modifications to the backups, removing sensitive data from files and application databases before restoring the modified state to the production environment.

Here's a good video about GDPR > https://www.veeam.com/videos/general-da ... 11236.html

[cookiejc]

That's useful information thanks for responding