Deleting VRB restore points - Impact on backups

[virtualwatts]

Greetings - Happy New Year,

We are using standard incremantals with weekly synth full. B&R 5.0.1

After changing our retention policy for a backup I archived the VRB files to another location.
Now the Veeam incremental backup fails saying restore points are missing "Unable to find rollback storage".
I was hoping we could move our VRB files to an archive folder to keep the folder size under the 500GB limit and didn't anticipate the VRB would be needed unless a restore point was requested during a restore.

How is the backup process tied to the VRB files and restore points?

Can I invoke a restore from the Synth Full VBK and forward incremantal VIB files without the restore point VRB files being present?

Thanks
Rick

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Rick,

Yes, you can. VRB and VIB files are your restore points. In order to perform a restore, a VBK file or a VBK file with VIB/VRB chain is required, so you need to archive either single VBK file or VBK + VRB/VIB files, meaning that there is no use in archiving VRBs/VIBs alone, as they are tied up and going - back and forward respectively - from specific VBK file.

To get a deeper overview of the backup modes, please check out our User Guide (page 11).

Thanks!

[Gostev]

We are using standard incremantals with weekly synth full. B&R 5.0.1
After changing our retention policy for a backup I archived the VRB files to another location.

Actually, I am totally confused by this. Standard incremental backup with synthetic fulls (all default settings) does not produce VRB files at all. There are only VIB files produced (forward increments). VRB are reversed increments that only appear if you enable previous full chain transform option, or use reversed incremental backup mode.

[virtualwatts]

Hi Guys,

Yes, rather than reverse incrementals we are using standard incrementals, with the option to create synth full weekly. And yes, we have the further option to transform previous full as VRB to conserve space. See, not so confusing. We have VRB files, VBK files and VIB files. Easy Peasy.

As I said, we quickly blew through our 300GB allotment heading towards a 500GB limit and so I am trying to archive off the VRB files. The premise is that if it is in fact just a restore point then I should be able to restore to the VBK plus VIB and not need the VRB for right now recover - but if I do need a PIT recovery I can bring back the VRB files, import them and recover to a point in time.

However, after removing the VRB files (through the OS) the backups fail with the message I provided earlier. So, my question was, what is the role of the VRB in the backup process (as opposed to the restore process).

Vitaliy - I re-read the user guide, thanks for the suggestion and the link, although there is mention of removing backup records (p105) it is only for the entire backup, I don't see any mention of removing a specific recovery point/VRB file from the Veeam db.


Thanks
Rick

[Gostev]

I am not sure why incremental backup run would fail because of missing VRB. This worths more thorough investigation, because theoretically VRBs are not needed for anything other than actual restores. It would be great if you could shoot your logs to support so that development can confirm the real reason for this error. If it appears that the code indeed requires VRBs to be present for incremental backup to run, I will ask development to consider removing this requirement in the future updates. Thanks!

[cmcc82]

And what about the impact on Replication??? not backup?

[foggy]

Actually, the same. If you are talking about v5, which stored replica restore points as vrb files, then deleting one of the vrb's will disable the ability to revert to this and all previous VM restore points. Now in V6, restore points are stored as regular VMware snapshots while for Hyper-V VMs vrb format is still used. Thanks.