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This week I was investigating some imbalance in size on two (scale out) repositories. Every repository gets the backup of a subset of all VMs and copy these to the second repository. And vice versa. So in theory, both repositories should be very similarly utilized. But when you look at volume properties, this is not the case. We see quite a large difference. So I used PowerShell to query VBR and sum all data of each VM on both repositories (I will post some code snippets next week). And I found out, VBR does not know about a notable amount of data (VBR-query showed much less used data than volume properties did).

So there seems to be backup data, VBR is not aware of. I call these files orphaned files. What are your experiences with orphaned files? Do your see them very often or not at all? Or are you not aware of their existence? Please let us know.

rUpdate] See my new blog post on how to find orphaned backup files

https://vnote42.net/2021/11/30/query-backup-job-space-on-veeam-repositories-and-find-orphaned-files-with-powershell/

Very interesting, are you using a backup copy job in pruning mode?

Very interesting, are you using a backup copy job in pruning mode?

Yes, periodic backup copies.

Finally I analyzed the difference of both SOBR (each about 500TB in size). On one of them I could find about 20TB of orphaned files. - about 3000 vib-files. The other one had no one! Sadly history does not go back that far, so I cant see what happened with the jobs.

I will (I promise) post some code snippets I used to analyze next week

Finally I analyzed the difference of both SOBR (each about 500TB in size). On one of them I could find about 20TB of orphaned files. - about 3000 vib-files. The other one had no one! Sadly history does not go back that far, so I cant see what happened with the jobs.

I will (I promise) post some code snippets I used to analyze next week

Here is the link for how to analyze used repository space using PowerShell:

 

[update]

I have some news about this. My customer opened a Support case. In an older build of 9.5 there was a bug, it causes VIB-files left on repository without any reference in Veeam DB. File was merged with full correctly but at deletion something went wrong and file was left behind. In my case, this behavior was corrected after the upgrade to v10. So we have to analyze which files we can delete at filesystem-level. Veeam Support do not provide such a procedure. 

Very interesting. :thumbsup_tone1:

Was there a KB Article published by VEEAM support? I think this will affect many customers...

I have checked my repos in the meantime and searched for such files.

Mostly I see files which were not deleted after retention was over with agent backups. I think this a different issue...

Very interesting. :thumbsup_tone1:

Was there a KB Article published by VEEAM support? I think this will affect many customers...

Have no info about a KB article. I will ask for. I don’t think it hits many customers. I have not seen any other suffering from this problem.

Which exact version of 9.5 caused this issue? Did you delete the orphans manually or did VBR delete them after the update. I assume the first though…

 

The only other reason I might have thought of is some sort of “immutability” function in your repo. I assume we will face things like this with the new V11 XFS repos as the underlying OS will prevent early deletes not in sync with the time-lock.

 

Cheers,

Mike

Which exact version of 9.5 caused this issue? Did you delete the orphans manually or did VBR delete them after the update. I assume the first though…

 

The only other reason I might have thought of is some sort of “immutability” function in your repo. I assume we will face things like this with the new V11 XFS repos as the underlying OS will prevent early deletes not in sync with the time-lock.

 

Cheers,

Mike

I don’t know the exact version of VBR that suffered from this bug. I must be a build before U4. The theory of Veeam support was, the bug “survived” update to U4. According to creation-date of orphaned files, just after upgrade to v10 we did not see any new orphaned files.

Yes, you guess right, VBR do not delete these files. We want to deleted them automatically. But I need to do some checks because we are talking about >800 files. 

Just added a link to my new post about finding orphaned backup files

https://vnote42.net/2021/11/30/query-backup-job-space-on-veeam-repositories-and-find-orphaned-files-with-powershell/

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