Feature Request: Let me delete incremental backups without forcing a full backup

[Daniel N.]

Hi,

I'm using the free version for my personal backup. As a personal user, I have limited backup space available (4 TB) and due to the nature of my work, I often create very big temporary files, that need not to be backed up. I typically have them deleted before the backup runs starts, but sometimes it accidentally adds between 100-300 GB of these temporary files into my daily incremental backups.

When that happens, I would like to shave off the last one or two incremental backup files (.vib) from my chain. However, this leads to Veeam creating a completely new backup chain, starting with a full backup and I simply don't have the backup space to hold two full backups on the storage.

Given the nature of incremental backup chains, this would not be necessary. Removing incremental backups from the end of the chain does not destroy the chain and Veeam would still be able to continue the chain.

So my suggestion is the following: Let Veeam understand the difference between a missing vib file at the end of the chain vs. the middle of the chain, so it can choose between creating a new full backup due to corruption, or just continuing from the last available incremental. That should not be too hard, as this functionality already exists in VBR - there you can even use the GUI to delete incremental backup files. It would even suffice, if this would be avaiable through a PowerShell cmdlet, although my understanding is that the Agent can not yet be managed through PowerShell?

Thank you.

[Gostev]

Hi, Daniel. Thanks for your feedback. Your request is certainly valid and makes sense for home users who can micro-manage backups of a single machine. However, please understand Veeam is a backup solution targeted at Enterprises backing up thousands of machines, and for such customers this feature has no value. Not to mention they all tend to use immutable backup storage for protection against cyber attacks, which makes deleting certain backup files simply impossible. Thanks