Deletion of VMs if no longer present

[tjestr]

Hi,

I've came across the issue, that Veeam still holds backups of VMs that are not available. The retention time (21 days) has of course expired.
(There are Veeam backup files with a modification date older than 2 months...)
This results in quite large Veeam backup files. Is there a way to automatically clean up old, non existent VMs out of the Veeam backup files?

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Falko,

You can remove those VMs by expanding corresponding records (backup jobs) in the backups node (left pane) and choosing "Delete from disk". This will remove all deleted VMs.

Please note that this operation won't shrink VBK file, it will just zero all the blocks inside the file, meaning that those blocks will be "re-used" for new VMs. Provided that you need to shrink a VBK file, you need to perform a full backup job run.

Thanks!

[Gostev]

Is there a way to automatically clean up old, non existent VMs out of the Veeam backup files?

This should happen automatically starting from v5 according to your retention policy. What's New document talks about this new feature in more details. Of course, as Vitaly mentioned this will not cause a VBK file to shrink, but will allow unused VBK blocks to be reused by new data. Because there is not way to "shrink" any file on most file systems without re-creating, the only way to make the file smaller is to perform full backup (which essentially creates new file). Thanks!

[tjestr]

Hi Vitialy,

off course I could manually remove all deleted VMs. But as Anton says it should be done automatically, which is not happening at our site. (We've already opened a support ticket.)
But thanks for the confirmation.

[tjestr]

Is there a possibility to see how much "white space" is within a VBK?

[Vitaliy S.]

Falko, there is no way to check out the "white space" within the VBK file.

[Gostev]

But as Anton says it should be done automatically, which is not happening at our site.

Curious, why do you think this does not happen? Blocks are freed up on VBK storage level, and you cannot really judge by looking at UI if this is happening or not.

[tjestr]

I can still restore VMs that have been deleted months ago, because I can see restore points in the Veeam UI. (Even all jobs are set to 21 days retention.)
So I think I can judge about that...

[tjestr]

Now here we come: Your support is now stating, that it is not possible to automatically clean up old, non existent VMs. It has to be done manually via the GUI. (Support #550017)

[Gostev]

Yes, discussed this with development and it looks like indeed VM will stay until you delete it from Backups node. This happens because VM level retention attempts to preserve last X (according to your retention policy) restore points of the VM which is no longer being backed up. We will look into changing this behavior in the next update. Thanks!

[tjestr]

Anton: Thanks for confirming this and thanks again for your, as always, fast reply!
Maybe you could make it an optional setting. (There will be people who want to preserve those, and there will be people who doesn't.)

[Gostev]

Yep, sure - the value will be customizable and thus "optional". You will be able to select 0 days if you do not want to preserve those, 30 days if you want to keep deleted VM data for 1 month, and so on. This is our current thinking.

[Felix]

[merged]

Hey,

I have several VMs inside my Veeam Backup 5.0.1 .vbk that no longer exist, eg. because their vCenter-ID changed due to moving/backup/restore etc.

Because these VMs are no longer in vCenter, Veeam Backup just keeps them in the .vbk and doesn't even prune them if I lower the retention policy. The retention policy only seems to apply to VMs that are currently beeing backed up.

This problem causes serious space issues on my primary backup storage.

How can I get rid of those ghost backups?

Best Regards,
Felix Buenemann