V12 UI Change

Today I came across a change to the UI in Veeam V12 which I think is worth mentioning and could catch you out.

If you have ever had the need to remove backup data from the Backup & Replication configuration database but want to keep the backup files intact, you might be familiar with the Remove from configuration option in the context menu.

The steps to perform this task have been the same since back since version 9 – from the Home view under the ‘Backups’ node right click a backup job and select ‘Remove from configuration’.

However things have changed in V12, and I can understand why. This isn’t a task that is performed all that often and normally has particular use cases catering more towards advanced Veeam users and the Veeam support engineers. Selecting this option by mistake isn’t going to be a complete disaster but more of an inconvenience. Your backup data associated to the job will still be intact but Veeam will not know anything about it.

To mitigate this the option in the context menu has been hidden and is only visible when holding down the control key before right clicking.

In fact the V12 user guide now specifically states that the option is designed for experienced users only.

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/vsphere/remove_from_backups.html?ver=120: V12 UI Change

Now, although I’m all for the new changes I can see a scenario where this could catch someone out. Many IT professionals develop what is dubbed ‘muscle memory’ where performing a common set of tasks across a system becomes second nature. Keeping that in mind, the V12 context menu only has the ‘Delete from disk’ option available by default. In that regard this has the potential to inadvertently delete your backups from disk so please be careful! There is a popup warning to confirm your action to delete from disk however it does have a very similar appearance to when removing from configuration.

Although this is something that is unlikely to occur, I’m sure inadvertently deleting backup data is more common and we might think. This can be prevented in a number of different ways, for example having an approval process where data can only be deleted if signed off by multiple parties. I’ve seen this implemented by other backup vendors and think it would make a great addition to a future release of Veeam. Lets watch this space!