VEEAM not deleting incremental backup files (recovery points)

[Bruce123]

Hi,

 

We have a problem with a backup job in VEEAM which backs up VMs on a HV host, but doesn’t delete the incremental backup files. The job is configured to retain 10 recovery points. But instead there are 311 of them; the full backup and 310 incremental files in the repository drive. It came to light because it ran out of space. The job is configured for forward incremental with synthetic full backups every Saturday. But I can’t see any full backups other than the first one taken back in Oct 2018. So it doesn’t look like the synthetic full backups are working. The funny thing is the VEEAM server is also backing up VMware VMs in a separate job and these are working ok.

 

Does anyone have any advice?

 

Kind Regards, Bruce.

[FragglePete]

We had the same issue a while back. Also came to light when our cluster ran out of disk space and put half the VMs into a Paused state.

 

I raised a call with Veeam and after much investigation just pointed to a Microsoft Issue and I'll need to raise a call with them. In fact, the two times I've contacted Veeam over issues they always seem to point the finger at Microsoft and wash the hands of it. Makes me wonder what I pay the support for with Veeam?

 

Anyway, the issue only seemed to be happening on our Hosts running Server 2012R2. The 2016 hosts were working just as they should. So, I spent a while back shuffling VMs about and getting the hosts upgraded to 2016 and since then no issues (I've since gone to 2019 on all but one of my hosts as we've replaced hardware over the last 18 months). I admit, didn't solve the initial problem, but it did resolve the issue and since on 2016 and 2019 Veeam has behaved very well.

 

Best of luck.

 

Pete