How do you preserve older backups when a new backup fails?

[wilh]

To cut the story short, I had an extra server running a few VMs that I didn't really care about too much... Veeam was backing everything up on a regular job - Daily, 3 restore points to keep, incremental and it was working without issue.

For the last few days, my backup reports show that a few VMs were skipped due to an error (which I'm trying to resolve separately). I ignored this, because I thought my backups were safe and these servers really aren't that important at all.

Today, I wanted to dig a little deeper and I'm in a bit of shock really... going to restore, expanding a backup job and selecting a VM shows that the last backup was less than a day ago:



However, if I then select this VM and look at points, it has deleted all but the oldest (And I think some VMs are missing altogether):



Other VMs are working as expected and I've never had any issues with Veeam. I'm sure this is down to me not following best practices, but, this is a weird one and I just wondered if anyone has seen this and can advise if I am doing something wrong here as surely if I set x points, it shouldn't delete the points if a backup hasn't run?

[foggy]

Hi William, that doesn't sound right, indeed. Have you contacted technical support already? What backup method does that job use - forward or forever forward incremental? What is the deleted VMs retention for this job? And what was the particular error message causing the job to skip those VMs?

[wilh]

Hi Foggy,

Firstly, not sure why the images are missing above - the links should be https://imgur.com/a/ofQFrqb for the first, and, https://imgur.com/a/vzjWjXU for the second.

Next, I haven't contacted technical support as to me, this feels quite silly and I can't believe it is intended to work this way, so, I'm almost certain I'm not following best practices or I've done something wrong rather than it being a defect/bug. (Although, I can't understand what's going on in my pictures above!).

The settings I have under storage is "Restore points to keep on disk: 3", under advanced > Backup, I just have "Incremental (recommended)", under advanced > Storage, I have the 3 recommendations ticked . Under Vsphere I have the two CBT checkboxes ticked and lastly "Enable backup from storage snapshots" under integration.

Everything else is unticked.

If you have any advice, it would be greatly appreciated!

[foggy]

It is still not clear if you have any periodic fulls enabled (either active or synthetic) and what is the retention setting for the deleted VMs (Advanced > Maintenance tab). Also, you haven't shared the exact failure reason. Investigation of such issues via forum messages ping-pong is not very effective, our support engineers would be able to look at your configuration during a remote session and define the reason for such behavior.