Remove clients from a backup but VBK file never shrinks.

[slobs]

New Admin here,

So my backup repository became full and I noticed that (as I am backing up my cluster automatically) there was a non critical VM that was created and had been backup up. So I deleted the backup from disk in B&R 8.0 and I am not seeing the disk space decrease. In my reading of other posts it seems that this action of deleting does not occur until after a successful job completes, which is an issue since I am out of space with no option to expand the volume where the backups are stored. I am using incremental backups and am not too sure about manually deleting vib or vbk files. Is there a way to get that VM to delete without deleting the vib or vbk files that contain other VMs I do want to retain?

[foggy]

Chris, please review this thread for details on reclaiming space in the backup file after deleting some VMs from disk, this post should explain how things work.

To reclaim space immediately, you need to manually delete some of the older files in your repository. To advice on whether you can do this and what particular files you can delete (or temporarily move to another location), please describe your retention settings and what files do you currently have in your backup repository. As far as I understand, you're using forward incremental backup method, right?

[dustin]

I've run into this issue several times and can never seem to find a solution, so I'm hoping someone can help me understand and resolve this issue. Using Backup & Replication v9 we have a backup copy job that copies to an offsite location. The problem is that if for whatever reason we run out of space on that repository (e.g. say I wanted too many restore points but didn't have enough space for them), I attempt to reclaim some disk space in the repository by deleting some VMs out of the backup copy job that don't need to be in there. However, after doing this and rescanning the repository, the disk space doesn't get reclaimed (Veeam currently reports that the repository is at 12kb free). Now I thought well maybe the job needs to run again, but if it runs again it'll complain about no disk space available and can't proceed, so I'm trying to figure out how to get that disk space reclaimed so the job can resume operation. What am I missing? In the past out of frustration I've just deleted the whole backup copy job, but this requires everything to be pushed offsite again which can take several days to sync up, and is obviously not a very good solution.

[foggy]

Please see above for the answers.

[ashman70]

I am currently doing backup copy jobs to an external drive that has run out of space, so the backup copy job is now failing. What is the best way to free up space on the external drive without breaking the chain of backups?

[Vitaliy S.]

Depending on your retention policy and space availability on different media, the suggestion may vary. Please review this topic and consider using Veeam ONE to be able to predict disk space usage and get immediate notifications once you're running out of free space.