new retention folder in Veeam log directory growing fast

[pirx]

We always had a pretty large Veeam log folder with 150-170GB (log level 4). But it is even more growing now and we have to remove old zipped logs much more often. We are now at ~200GB. I found out that there is a retention folder wich keeps 40GB of logs in the format \Logs\System\Retention\2024-03-30\job-xxx. The job folders contains ~100.000 of unzipped log files with those 40 GB, many files are now older than a year. Our retention time is 10 weeks. The amount of small files that are kept and not deleted or zipped is filling up the disk.

Is this the expected behavior for this retention folder?

[pirx]

PS E:\Veeam\Logs\System\Retention> (gci -Recurse -File -Include *.zip).count
0

PS E:\Veeam\Logs\System\Retention> (gci -Recurse -File -Include *.log).count
102456

A lot file are older than 4 months

PS E:\Veeam\Logs\System\Retention> (gci -Recurse -File -Include *.log | Where CreationTime -lt (Get-Date).AddDays(-120)).count
71806

[pirx]

Bump - before I open a support case, maybe someone can confirm that it is just how it works. Which would be a bit strange...

I see Veeam\Logs\System\CheckpointRemoval still growing with a lot of subdirectories. From the date of the folders and the last written timestamp it looks like obsolete data. Our retention is 10 weeks. But nearly all logfiles are uncompressed, therefor the CheckpointRemoval content is now 45 GB. The overall size of the Veeam log folder is not 230GB - and this is a after tuning log settings with Veeam supper 1-2 years ago.

[pirx]

Still having the issue. As the structure below System/Retention and System/CheckpointRemoval is different than for other folders, logs are never zipped as every days has a new folder. Therefor no retention and we have now 100GB+ logs. Can I safely remove all folders going back >12 moinths?

I don't know why the structure here is different and based on date and not repository.

[richardbradley]

Hi pirx,
Yes the System/Retention and System/CheckpointRemoval are safe to remove, if it helps I was recently impacted by this also for 2 customers so I have written a PS script that cleans up logs older than 90 days for the 2 below folders. It is designed to be run by itself or by a RMM tool, feel free to use it I am hoping it helps you or others also.
https://github.com/acgdickie/Delete-VeeamSystemLogs
I will also be adding more log locations to it shortly, Once I confirm with support those locations are safe to cleanup.
Richard

[DanielJ]

Is this "evergrowing system logs" problem present in the v13 appliance as well? Not as easy to clean up manually there. How does a problem like this pass QA, or for that matter pass the developer who implemented it? "This function will accumulate logs forever, but that's fine"?