Fixing Veeam “Can’t Delete Replica When It Is Being Processed” Errors

I’ve used Veeam Backup & Replication for a long time now, and when we restructure storage, redeploy VMs, or change our replication jobs we sometimes get situations where we get the error:

Error: Can't delete replica when it is being processed

Here’s how I fix it. As always, your mileage may vary, and free advice is often worth what you paid, especially from a stranger on the Internet. Veeam support is probably a safe but much higher latency source of non-free advice.

1. Stop the affected jobs and disable them.
2. Ensure that the replicas are gone, from both the VMware environment (vCenter) and in Backup & Replication (Replicas -> Ready, then right-click and Delete From Disk). Don’t delete it from the configuration or you’ll have to go in and edit the VM Exclusions.
3. Browse the target datastore and remove any orphaned disk files or folders associated with that replica.
4. Clone the affected job (by doing this you make sure that the replica you’re about to create has nearly identical properties to what the other job would have created). Change the virtual machine list to be only the affected VM or VMs.
5. Run the replication job. Let it complete. It should create a replica of the VM.
6. Edit the original job. Enable “Low connection bandwidth (enable replica seeding).” In the “Seeding” tab check “Map replicas to existing VMs” and click the “Detect” button to automatically map most/all of them. Check to make sure the affected VMs are detected, and fix it if not.
7. Run the original job. It should complete without error now.
8. Edit the original job and disable “Low connection bandwidth (enable replica seeding).” I’d run the job again just to make sure everything is good.

Good luck.