Veeam the object has already been deleted or has not been completely created

A quick post here of an issue I ran into supporting a Veeam Backup job in a particular environment.  After needing to restore a handful of VMs to rollback a few bad changes made, the next backup job failed.  The error from Veeam the object has already been deleted or has not been completely created.  The email report for the error contained the message details:

Veeam the object has already been deleted or has not been completely created

So I knew the error had to relate to the VMs being restored since this is the preceding event prior to the error happening in the next backup job cycle.  Why did I see this error message with the next backup?

Reason and Resolution

When you do a full VM restore, once restored it will have a new reference ID in vCenter, so the next backup job will fail due to the invalid reference to the new VM.

The workaround to this issue in Veeam is fairly simple.  You have to rescan your vCenter environment to make sure it picks up the new reference ID of the newly restored VM, then remove and add the VM back to your backup job.

The first thing we need to do is rescan our vCenter environment.  To do that you can click on the Virtual Machines option at the bottom left of the console.  Then when you see your vCenter environment, right click on your vCenter server and select to rescan.

You will see a job window open with progress from the rescan operation.

After the rescan, go to your backup job and remove the problematic VM(s) that were previously restored.  Go back to Add Objects in the job properties and then in the upper part of the Add Objects screen there is a refresh button.  Click the button and it will refresh the infrastructure.  After that you can add back the restored VMs.

Also, you shouldn’t have to do anything with the previous incremental restore points.  The chain will move forward as expected.

Final Thoughts

Hopefully, if you experienced the Veeam the object has already been deleted or has not been completely created error, the above will help you to quickly sort out the issue and make sure your next backup completes successfully.  Keep in mind again you will need to run through this process if you have run a full restore on the VM due to the new reference ID that is generated.