How and when does Veeam reclaim disk space?

[dpgator33]

I'm still in evaluation, and while I'm loving the product, I have this one concern. I've taken a sample of a few VM and Hyper-V servers and put them into a standard "Forward Incremental" backup rotation. Our typical backup model is a pretty typical D2D2T, but since I don't have a spare tape drive for the evaluation process, I'm just going D2D. I'm about out of space on this 150GB partition I'm using, and I manually deleted a bunch of backup files from the interface (not through Windows Explorer). If I use Windows explorer, I don't see the folders for these servers anymore, but the OS is still showing that the disk space is in use, as well as the Veeam UI. I've also done a "rescan" of the repository think that might do the trick, but it has not. Is there a regular schedule where Veeam deletes the files for good like in the middle of the night, and is there a way to manually do it? Thanks!!!

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Daniel,

How did you remove the backup files? Did you click delete them from disk or just remove from the console?

Thank you!

[dpgator33]

I selected "Delete from Disk", and partially that did happen. If I go into the location of the backup repository using Windows explorer, the folders that previously existed for those servers are no longer there. But when I look at the drive itself, it says, for example, "25GB of 250GB free" when it should say "200GB of 250GB free". Yet, I can't seem to locate these files anywhere in the folder structure.

[Vitaliy S.]

Daniel, could it be that some other files are taking the space on your drive? If you choose "Delete from disk" option, then all backup files you have selected will be immediately removed from the repository. Check the size of the repository folder, how much space does it take?

[nmace]

I ran into an issue like this myself, it ended up being because the location Veeam wrote it's backups to was a server 2012 dedup'd volume and even though the files were deleted, they weren't really take up that much space due to the dedup. I also discovered during this I had a hung process and server 2012 was no longer performing Garbage Collection tasks on the volume which will make you run out space pretty fast.

start-dedupejob -full -path d: -type garbage-collection was my new best friend there for a while. Not sure that is the OP's problem or not though.