Too many restore points on GFS jobs

[btmaus]

I checked my GFS backup jobs in the repository, and there are too many restore points. I set it to keep 12 monthly restore points, some of them are keeping over 20!

It seems to be from when I enabled the "Read the entire restore point from source backup instead of synthesizing it from increments" option. It kept all months up to that point, then the filenames changed and it's keep all the monthlies since then as well.

What do I do, I only want to keep 12 months as I configured it?

[DGrinev]

Hi Glenn,

What version of Veeam B&R are you using?

Similar problem has been detected by our devs team in VBR v9 during switching to "read from source...".
You can manually delete old restore points.
Retention policy should apply without any troubles on newly created monthly chain.

Thanks!

[btmaus]

Running v9.5. The restore points would be there from v8.

So I manually delete them from Windows Explorer? Will Veeam automatically detect that they are deleted or what must I do within Veeam?

[foggy]

Yes, you can delete them manually and then open backup properties and remove missing backups.

[btmaus]

Thanks foggy. I deleted them manually, but when I look at the backup properties for that job, they all still appear there normally. It doesn't seem to think anything has changed?

[DGrinev]

Hi Glenn,

Did you try to rescan repository and then go to properties?

Thanks!

[btmaus]

I tried a re-scan, there's no difference. Going to the properties of the job still shows the original restore points even though they have been deleted on the disk.

What now?

[foggy]

If you're positive you've deleted them and they still show up normally without the ability to delete corresponding records from database, please contact support for a closer look.

[btmaus]

Case # 02044962

[btmaus]

OK seems like it is resolved now.

I had to disable all the backup copy jobs, to release a lock on the associated .VBM files, as the re-scan job was complaining that the files were locked. Once I did that, I could re-scan the repository without any warnings, and now the deleted restore points display as unaccessible. It now gives me the option to "forget" or "delete from disk".

[foggy]

Glad you've nailed it, thanks for coming back to update us.

[Trin]

We have a backup copy job set to keep 12 monthly restore points (as well as 4 weekly).

Due to space limitations, I want to delete the oldest 4 of these files before I start making any other changes.

Beyond changing the setting in the job itself from 12 to 8, what are the steps I need to go through in order to manually delete the oldest 4 .vbk files from the repository, without messing up the job?

I've had a read through the documentation but I can't find anything that covers this other than removing the whole lot.

Many thanks

[foggy]

You can safely remove them manually and then get rid of them in UI as described above. Thanks!