I have one Veeam job to backup my VM with only selected disk selected and this job already runing for several months and the full backup size is 30TB. The retention for this job set to 2 days.
Last friday i remove 3 HDDs from the Veeam Job and this 3 disks exclusion have capacity 8TB.
Today i check why the full backup still 30TB and not decreased even 3 disks already take out from the job?
Let say i delete 100 files then after retention is met the active full backup still contains this 100 files?
Yes it does! Until you run an Active Full you will not see the retention nor size go down. That is how this works.
Do not mean to be too direct here, but this is incorrect.
Image level backups have no concept of files as it’s a block-level backup. If 100 files are deleted from production with Forever Forward Incremental backups, then the blocks will remain in the full backup file until they are marked as overwritable by retention. Eventually the merge process will overwrite these old data blocks with newer ones still in retention, and the data will be truly gone at that point. Even before that, if the blocks are marked as inactive but not yet overwritten, said files will NOT be restorable even if some of the data blocks containing these files still exist in the VBK.
It’s very important to understand that a VBK is simply a container for data blocks and metadata, and nothing more. You cannot shrink the size of a VBK without using Compact Full. Please note however Compact Full requires space the same size as a full backup; during the compact full process, only valid and still required data blocks will be copied to the new VBK, regaining _some_ space in the backup file. (and more importantly, defragmenting the VBK internals, which usually results in a nice performance boost. If you notice File/Application restores are rather slow to load/restore and you use Forever Forward Incremental, Compact Full or Active/Synthetic full will help return the performance)
Same applies for your disk exclusions -- the VBK is not going to shrink until either a Compact Full or an Active/Synthetic full is run.
I have no available space to make compact or active/synthetic full backup so maybe i will delete this job and the files then i create a new backup job.
I have no available space to make compact or active/synthetic full backup so maybe i will delete this job and the files then i create a new backup job.
Did you enable the “Remove deleted items data after X days” setting like I suggested?
A Synthetic Full shouldn't need as much space as an Active
A Synthetic Full shouldn't need as much space as an Active
To expand on this, a synthetic full on a REFS or XFS based repository will use barely any extra space. It just needs some working space.
I have no available space to make compact or active/synthetic full backup so maybe i will delete this job and the files then i create a new backup job.
If there are no other ways to reclaim space, then this will work.
No need to delete the job though, just select the backup and right-click > Delete from Disk. Job will automatically trigger an Active Full on the next run.
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