Not heard anyone ask this before @Kelemvor . Honestly, what you could do is simply test the behavior to see if Veeam deletes files no longer there...which I think is what happens. And by deletes, I mean Veeam would delete them after the Retention is met (e.g. 30 days, if that’s what you set). I assume you’re using Veeam Agent for Windows? If possible, create a Job with a given Retention and backup what you have currently (small subset for now). Remove the directory/set of files you backed up and see how Veeam behaves. Again, I don’t think that OD feature matters. Veeam either “sees” files/directories or doesn’t and either backs them up, or not. Below is info on how the Agent manages backup retention:
https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/agentforwindows/userguide/retention_days.html?ver=60
Hope that helps.
Veeam cannot free space on OneDrive - only backs it up and then deletes backups based on retention. The space issue is the user/admin to deal with manually unfortunately.
Hi @Kelemvor, Veeam will backup what it sees. When the data isn’t there it’s effectively no more than a hyperlink and when it is there it can see the file.
Question: is this personal M365 or a business M365 tenant? Veeam can backup business M365 data including OneDrive via our Veeam backup for Microsoft 365 product. This includes as a hosted SaaS solution with Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365.
On your question of what would happen in your scenario, Veeam has a retention period for restoration points, so we’d hold onto each copy of data for as long as you’d specified since the backup. These would be tracked in their specific retention points so you wouldn’t see all data in a single backup, you’d have to browse between the points for the data you need and once your retention period lapsed, it would be deleted from the backups.
Veeam is only going to back up the data blocks that are actually on the drive. So in the case of “Freed up space”, only the pointer files themselves will be backed up, not the data that is actually sitting in OneDrive.
Is this OneDrive a personal account or business account? Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 will allow you to backup the OneDrive target if it’s a business account.
If it’s a personal account though, your best bet is to upgrade your hard drive to a larger one and back that up.
This is a Microsoft Family account. Not a business account.
I did upgrade my internal drive to hold all the data, but will have some in OneDrive for sharing. I’ll just set OneDrive to always keep everything on the drive and then Veeam should see it and back it up without any issues. I just got really confused when I did a quick test and couldn’t find the files. :)
Interesting scenario @Kelemvor Veeam Agent for Windows relies on local file visibility, so OneDrive’s Free Up Space feature can limit backup scope. One workaround could be scripting selective sync before backup runs. Thanks @coolsport00 for the retention insights very useful!"
@Kelemvor,
Are you doing volume or file level backup, and more importantly, what is your desired result from below:
- The backup should retrieve the data from OneDrive and back up the retrieved data?
- The backup should grab the stub files left behind by OneDrive and restore usable stubs when needed?
This is important in my opinion as there are many different opinions on how Veeam should treat the stub files left behind after a file offload like this, so important we understand what you actually want to happen during backup / restore.
I don’t really need the files from OneDrive on the laptop I’m really going to be using this on. I just did a test on my own laptop and was confused why nothing got backed up so thought I’d ask.
I was hoping it would do option 1, but figured that would make the backup take forever if it had to download hundreds of gigs and write it to the external drive at the same time.
