Dealing with Replicas

[plankton]

I learned the hard way that deleting a replica from VBR the production VM is also deleted. I believe this is because the replica was started from vsphere instead of from VBR(correct me if I am wrong please)
I managed to restore from a backup of the VM but now I don't know how to deal with my replicas.
I originally wanted to clean out old replicas so I sorted them by creation time and checked the date. When I finished deleting the oldest replicas I realized my production VM was gone.
I want to know how can I safely delete unwanted replicas without affecting my productions VMs. Is there any indicator either in the VM or the replicas that can tell me if I can delete or not the VM?
Thank you

[Mildur]

Hello Plankton

Welcome to the forum.

Deleting a Replica VM does not delete the original VM. But I cannot say what exactly has happened, I recommend you to check it out with our customer support team.

Replicas should only be managed by the backup server. Do all operations (failover, fallback) with the backup console or PowerShell. Manually starting a Replica in vCenter/ESXI will break the replication job.
You can safely delete Replica VMs in the backup console when they are in a ready state: https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=120

You can check out our Best Practice guide for additional information about replication.
https://bp.veeam.com/vbr/4_Operations/O ... _jobs.html

Best,
Fabian

[plankton]

Hi Mildur
Thank you for the info. I have no idea what happened but in my case deleting the replica did remove my production VM(in fact it deleted two VMs). For some reason, it only affected two VMs although I deleted replicas from other VMs and these were not affected.
I would like to know how replicas and production VMs are linked to avoid this from happening again. I'll have to contact support team like you said.
Thank you.