We have veeam backup job running and retention period is 14 days. However I see there is data for the backup job for over 20 days. What file is missing from the backup file list that is causing this issues.
Anything you can see that is missing?
Page 1 / 1
This very well may be accurate because of the job Mode you're using. Are you taking occasional Full backups? Synthetic or Active in your Storage section > Advanced area? If so, you're running Fwd Incremental and your job has to retain older backup files to meet your retention. You need all files in a chain to perform restore operations.
You can read more about Backup Retention here:
https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/vsphere/backup_methods.html?ver=120
If you're referring to something different than what I explained, please elaborate/clarify.
You can review the retention settings for Veeam and there are links to each job type at the bottom of this page as well - Short-Term Retention Policy - User Guide for VMware vSphere (veeam.com)
Veeam has a great KB post animating how retention works. Good stuff! See the links at the bottom for each method.
More than likely this is as it should be, but it would be helpful if we saw what your retention policy is. I’m confused as to why there are two full backup files on the 13th, and then only 4 incrementals, no backups on the 17th or 18 (failures?), etc. Also, if your keeping only 20 days of backups, but you have GFS retention such as keeping monthly backups for a set amount of time, etc, then it’s going to need to keep more restore points than what you have configured in order to keep a valid backup chain to transforming into those restore points assuming synthetic fulls, etc. It’s hard to fully know what is going on here without seeing the job logs, backup retention policies, etc. In general, I don’t get to concerned about the actual backup files though as long as I’m seeing successful backups and restore point maintenance. And as long as you’re not looking at this due to space issues, etc.
Looking at this, and the dates, this looks right. 14 days is the minimum retention. You can’t have an incremental without the active full. I don’t know all your settings, but others have posted the retention policies and how they work.
As an example, If I ran a weekly full with incremental, and my retention was set to 8 days, Even on the 9th day running this job it can’t just delete the active full from day one or that whole week would be invalid and I’d only have 2 valid restore points.
Hi
Were any of the comments helpful with your retention query? If not, what other questions do you have? If anything was beneficial in helping you with your retention question, please mark a comment as ‘Best Answer’ so others who may come across your post with the same query are able to see what was done to best answer issues/questions on retention.
Thank you!
Hi
Were any of the comments helpful with your retention query? If not, what other questions do you have? If anything was beneficial in helping you with your retention question, please mark a comment as ‘Best Answer’ so others who may come across your post with the same query are able to see what was done to best answer issues/questions on retention.
Thank you!
This was not a question thread 
Obviously just going through the non-answered ones to ‘clean up’ things
Where does one go to troubleshoot cases where the retention policy does not actually delete older backups? Something seems to have corrupted my backup chain to where the older backup files have not been deleted, and now I’m out of space thus causing the backups to now fail.
Where does one go to troubleshoot cases where the retention policy does not actually delete older backups? Something seems to have corrupted my backup chain to where the older backup files have not been deleted, and now I’m out of space thus causing the backups to now fail.
Veeam support, but this could be due to a number of reasons.
Perhaps it was unable to delete an old backup as it was already out of space not allowing it to merge. Veeam requires free space for these operations.
There are some restore points as old as 5 years, so it isn’t due to lack of space. There are orphaned restore points, but I don’t know which I can safely delete. I tried deleting once before and lost the entire backup chain and had to start all over.
That said, I have initiated a support case with Veeam Support - thanks
Good call. That is your best bet. You will have to make or add space either way, but what I was getting at is backup file merge for retention processing requires scratch space. Support are always the best choice when your having a serious issue. Good luck and let us know what you find out.
Haven’t gotten a response back on my case yet, but I was able to determine that the backup chains start with the synthetic fulls, and the rest of the chain are the incrementals. I verified the oldest part of the complete chain, and moved all the older files to a temp location, rescanned the repo, watched the restore points go down to their normal configured number, and deleted the temp location. I successfully validated I can still retrieve backups from the earliest part of the chain, so the issue is now resolved with the freed space allowing backups to continue normally.
Haven’t gotten a response back on my case yet, but I was able to determine that the backup chains start with the synthetic fulls, and the rest of the chain are the incrementals. I verified the oldest part of the complete chain, and moved all the older files to a temp location, rescanned the repo, watched the restore points go down to their normal configured number, and deleted the temp location. I successfully validated I can still retrieve backups from the earliest part of the chain, so the issue is now resolved with the freed space allowing backups to continue normally.
Great to hear you were able to resolve the issue and thank you for sharing the solution to better help the community.
Comment
Enter your E-mail address. We'll send you an e-mail with instructions to reset your password.