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MrTomahawk
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Full Name: Craig Miller
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flat vmdk files in profiles left behind after restore

Post by MrTomahawk »

Our windows server we have in our enviornment which runs the Veeam Backup & Replication management software ran out of diskspace of its C:\ drive today, so the end result in us unable to open the management console. I did some digging trying to figure out where all the diskspace went, and I found that two of our admins had some wierd folders in their profile which contained flat vmdk files (i.e. servername-flat.vmdk).

The files were located in: C:\users\%username%\AppData\Local\Temp\##\????????.???\......the ## is a number and ??????? were charcters which werent constant (i.e. C:\users\%username%\AppData\Local\Temp\36\eqxzuean.vzv\ or another is C:\users\%username%\AppData\Local\Temp\46\n3gzekwi.bpt\ or C:\users\%username%\AppData\Local\Temp\15\dj4bnmhg.gdv\)

I talked to the admin's that had these to see if they knew how they got there and they were unsure, but it seemed as thought the dates on the files matched up to days inwhich they did a restore in Veeam for that particular server that had flat vmdk files presence. The restore that eas preformed in at least one of teh occurances was a guest file level restore.

Now we've several other restores on other servers and I too found similar folders structures in the admin's profile, but in most cases the flat vmdk files are 0k in size....so perhaps some purge call at the end of the restore was supposed to occur to delete these file contents failed for whatever reason.

I'm easily able to delete these files, but it I can't help that think that thuis seems like this may be a poor design in way Veeam does its guest file restores. I could easily see this happening again and makes me think that maybe we should move user's profile directory off the system folder to prevent such occurance from happening again. Is there possibly an easier way of redirecting where Veeam "temporarily" stores these files during a restore?

Please note the version of Veeam B & R that this occured on is: 6.5.0.144
foggy
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Re: flat vmdk files in profiles left behind after restore

Post by foggy »

Craig, of course, these files should be cleaned up automatically. However there were some issues regarding cleanup of temporary files residing in AppData\Local\Temp folder that were addressed in the Veeam B&R 7.0 Patch 1. Probably this also covers what you're observing in your environment and it is worth upgrading to resolve this.
MrTomahawk
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Re: flat vmdk files in profiles left behind after restore

Post by MrTomahawk »

This does look similar, but in our case the flat vmdk files were several GB in size (one of them was 11GB in size), and this only seems to talk about log, zip and cache files which are much smaller in size. We are pushing through our mangement to upgrade to v7. Hopefully it fixes this issue. Thanks
foggy
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Re: flat vmdk files in profiles left behind after restore

Post by foggy »

Most likely your admins had performed VM files restore (not guest OS FLR), during which VM disk files were placed into the temporary folder.
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