How do I remove Azure Backup recovery points that show as expired (by more than 3 months), but still have not been cleaned up?

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How do I remove Azure Backup recovery points that show as expired (by more than 3 months), but still have not been cleaned up?

Jeremy Kropf 25

In Azure Backup of a VM, I have two recovery points that show as expired (by more than 3 months), but still have not been cleaned up and thus are taking up space. Is there a way to get the cleanup process to remove/merge them?

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Ricardo Correia 165 Microsoft Employee

Hi Jeremy,

Where do you see the RPs marked as expired?

Could it be that those RPs where manual backups with a different expiring date than the one set on the policy?

Slightly changing the retention period on the policy makes any difference on the next day?

Seen in the past an aesthetic issue where RPs seem to be available but where in fact already purged.
One thing that you can do to check this is to attempt a restore from those expired RPs. If possible and expiration date is not being honored, then you should file a support request to unblock this from backend

Hope this helps!

RAC

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Jeremy Kropf 25 Reputation points

2023-09-07T12:43:50.4766667+00:00

I see them marked as expired in the Azure portal:

They both have the "Weekly" recovery point tag. Obviously, they have been stuck like this for a while. We used to store weekly backup points, in addition to daily and monthly ones. We are trying to cut down on the storage costs, so that's why I was looking into this. Two days ago, after seeing these were still there, and still wanting to reduce storage, I removed the weekly backup retention all together. However, these still remained there yesterday, and so then I posted the question. They are still there this morning.

Interesting what you said about it not being about to restore. It appears like that might be what it is, because when I tried to do a file recovery from one of those items on the azure portal, and trying to download the executable, it failed. After a number of minutes, I received: "Failed to download Item Level Recovery script."

I am guessing that means that the recovery points don't actually exist?
Ricardo Correia 165 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2023-09-07T13:00:04.2366667+00:00

Seems so, I would try running a disk restore anyway, as its a full backend operation while ILR has some other dependencies. If that fails I would say most likely there is nothing there

Note: if those are just one of many RPs, removing them would only make a difference if there was substantial deletions between the time they were taken and the next RP. Otherwise the majority of the blocks (unchanged ones) will be merged will the next RP
Jeremy Kropf 25 Reputation points

2023-09-07T13:37:57.28+00:00

Thanks for your help. I am trying a full restore to see if that will fail or not. As far as the space goes for those particular RPs, yes, that is probably right for now. However, we do churn data over a fair amount, so right now, they probably aren't that big an issue, once they get to be the oldest backups we have, it will be more significant.
SadiqhAhmed-MSFT 49,326 Reputation points Microsoft Employee Moderator

2023-09-12T16:40:37.97+00:00

@Jeremy Kropf Any update on this?
Jeremy Kropf 25 Reputation points

2023-09-12T16:45:06.6133333+00:00

Indeed, the full restore attempts all failed saying those restore points didn't exist. So, I do believe that they are not taking up data, but rather are only showing on the portal for some reason. I believe this would be something that MSFT support would have to clean up, but since they aren't taking up data, I haven't pursued it further.

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How do I remove Azure Backup recovery points that show as expired (by more than 3 months), but still have not been cleaned up?

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