Hey guys I have been monitoring Veeam for our company for a while now, however one of my repositories is out of free space. I can see that someone switched the job from incremental to reverse - the trouble is the 31 day retention policy only seems to apply to the reverse incremental backups - meaning I have 1TB's worth of standard incremental files sitting there still (including the full backup which was part of the incremental jobs).
So to cut a long story short my servers are showing 41 restore points instead of 31 - the 10 extras are not needed, but I don't know the best way of getting rid of these.
I have raised a support call with Veeam a short while ago, so I may get an answer from them soon - but thought that this would be quite an interesting topic on the forum as well.
Do you probably have the part of the old forward incremental backup chain (several (depending on the frequency of fulls) VBK files and a set of VIBs) plus the new reverse incremental chain containing a set of VRBs and the latest VBK? Then the number of restore points on disk will conform to your retention policy in time automatically.
Yes, that's the problem I have an old chain lingering around so it shows more restore points and thus using more of my storage location than it should be. How can I delete these files without upsetting Veeam?
You can just remove them manually. But keep in mind, that the corresponding records will not be immediately removed from the database and will still be visible in the restore wizard, for example, until finally they are deleted according to retention.
You can remove the whole old forward increment chain including related vbk, just note that after that you will have the number of restore points as of the reverse incremental chain (i guess less than 31 for the time being, hard to say without knowing what files do you have in your repository).
Great all sorted, I guess it's just a shame you cant do this within Veeam - I guess the risk of breaking a chain is what Veeam devs are worried about, but in my case the chain wasn't related to these old files. I manually deleted the files which weren't needed anymore - but it will obviously still show more restore points then there actually are - I don't think the retention feature will actually trim the restore points count...
