This article will explain How to fix Broken backup chain in Veeam Backup & Replication.
A Broken Backup Chain is when you have full Backup(.vbk), and several (can be 2 or more) incremental (.vib) that were deleted or corrupted. Mainly if you are not using “Reverse Incremental.” Increments always injected in the last backup to create a full backup. With this option is more difficult to have a Broken Backup Chain.
Examples:
Note: “Reverse Incremental” is always a slow backup compared with “Incremental.” Since last backup will always be a full backup and all incremental will be injected in the last backup.
In this case that we will discuss in this article is when we try to restore a VM with a Backup that has a broken chain we get an error: “Backup files are unavailable.”
- Restore
Just check the restore points and restore.
As we can check in the next image, this particularly VM had four restore points. Then we choose one to restore the VM.
When we try to restore the VM, we get a Backup with a broken chain, and we get an error: “Backup files are unavailable.”
Even we get this error, the VM restore continue and then finish with the next image.
As we can check in the last line in the log, the incremental .vib file doesn’t exist.
The VM was created in the vCenter, but we cannot power on, and there is no Virtual Disk.
So somehow this .vib file disappear from the Repository. This can only happen if there are any issues with your Storage Repository, or you put one Repository Offline in maintenance mode, and some files will be unavailable, or someone deleted the files manually in a wrong sequence (In this case, I bet on this one).
Even if you choose a different restore point or even the full restore point we get the same error. Since the chain in this backup is broken, so cannot restore the VM.
Next is to check the Backup Repository and check if there is any restore points are not in the chain and if we have a Broken Chain Backup, fix it.
- Check Backup Repository.
- Go to Backups, then Disk and select the Job that you are trying to restore.
- Right click and select Properties.
As we can check in the next image lot of Incremental restore points are not available. The only is available is the Full Backup.
Investigating the Backup Chain(full backup and its incremental) is official that we have a Broken Backup Chain and needs to be fixed.
Note: Double check other VMs to confirm that all have the same problem.
- Fix Backup Chain
Now to fix this Broken Backup Chain we need to select one of the broken/miss files and choose to Forget or to Delete to miss incremental files.
- Forget — you can remove records about missing restore points from the configuration database. Veeam Backup & Replication will “forget” about these restore points and will not display them in the console. The backup files will remain on disk.
- Delete — you can remove records about missing restore points from the configuration database and delete backup files from disk.
For the Forget and Delete options there also an option to perform this task only in the select Job/Restore Point, or do for all.
- To remove only the selected restore point and restore points that depend on it (that is, a part of the backup chain starting from this restore point), select This and dependent backups.
- To remove all restore points from the unavailable extent, select All unavailable backups.
For this particular case, I choose to option Forget and with the select All unavailable backups.
Just confirm and let Veeam remove all corrupted restore points and fix the Backup Chain.
Note: Depending on your system and the size of your backups, this procedure can take a while.
After Veeam remove all corrupted files, the only restore point that was available was the initial Full Backup. So it means that all incremental were corrupt, or files were delete (for example 2 and 3 from our initial Incremental image).
As we can check in the next image, all VMs have only one restore point available.
Note: It could even happen if you have new VMs that were backup in those corrupted incremental will no longer be available(we had 20 VMs with this). So, no backups for those VMs.
After you fix the Broken Backup Chain, we can now restore any VM (using the available restore points).
Hope this helps you to fix your Broken Backup Chain in Veeam Backup & Replication.
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*Full Credit for this article given only to ProVirtualZone*
