Why can't we just delete VEEAM snapshots?

[danm190]

I seem to have a few older snapshots? How can I free up the disk space? Will a full veeam backup clear them out? Can I just manually delete them?

[tsightler]

Do you mean Veeam restore points/backups? Snapshots are on VMware.

[Vitaliy S.]

If you're referring to restore points, then you control the number of available points via backup job retention policy settings.

[averylarry]

Every once in a while I'll get a "stranded" snapshot (usually when Veeam crashes during a job and I have to hard reboot). Even more rarely I'll get a "hidden" snapshop where even the VMware client doesn't see the snapshot but you can see it if you look directly on the datastore.

(I'm assuming you're not talking about a replica VM -- rather a production VM.)

If you're not currently running any Veeam jobs against a production VM, and you don't have any manual snapshots, then I recommend "delete all" in the snapshot manager.

In the case of a "hidden" snapshot, you actually have to manually create a snapshot first and then you can do a "delete all" in hte snapshot manager.

***Make sure you understand/know what you're doing before using the "delete all" on a production VM.***

[dsimpkins]

Hi there,

Based on the latest forum digest email this morning from Anton, i've downloaded and installed the free Veeam One software. The walkthrough from Rick's blog was perfect, and im up and running.
Because of Veeam One, i've seen a lot of errors and the one in particular im interested in is aged snapshots. I use Veeam Backup, and it appears that it isn't removing the snapshots it creates properly.

Anyway, the simple question I have is: can I remove the snapshots that say "Please do not delete this snapshot. It is being used by Veeam Backup.", when the backup job is not running but in fact is idle? Or are these snapshots required even after the job is complete? If not, im going to go through and delete all of them!

Thanks
Daniel

[dsimpkins]

I should also mention, i did a bit of a search and related posts seemed to be as per below, but before I went deleting things, i thought i'd get a more definitive answer!
thanks

http://forums.veeam.com/viewtopic.php?f ... ver#p46391
http://forums.veeam.com/viewtopic.php?f ... ver#p22203

D

[foggy]

Daniel, you can safely remove these snapshot via vSphere Client manually.

[dsimpkins]

Thanks Alex. As always, appreciate the help from the Veeam forums.

[Jamie Pert]

we've noticed that at times on some servers when manually clearing out snapshots of Exchange servers the server will lose connectivity when removing the snapshot...

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Jamie,

Yes, this behavior might be expected due to the nature VMware snapshot removal technique, see this topic for further reading: Snapshot removal issues of a large VM

Thank you.