Expired Backup Sets unable to delete on Backup Exec 16

If these sets are part of an incremental or differential chain then they will not delete unless the last part of the chain is beyond the date (by design)

If you right click on an expired sets one of the options lets you see the dependent sets (does this show anything in your case)

I assume you are talking about disk sets that are expired, as tape sets that are expired will remain on the system until the tape is overwritten.

Also note that disk sets that are on detachable media can only expire when the disk is online and there is a difference between RDX style removable cartridges (where the expired sets only get deleted when a new job tries to use the same cartridge) and USB style detachable disks (where the deletion should take place within 1 hour of being online.)

Also just for info - "Allow Backup Exec to delete all expired backup sets" being ticked AND "DeleteLastRecoverySetsOnceExpired" set to one are actually the same thing as the registry setting is controlled directly by the setting within the BE conosle (in BE 2012 there was no console option so you had to use the registry setting)

It should be noted that this setting should ONLY be used with extreme caution / understanding of the effect as it is there to ensure that you always have at least one valid backup set of a given set of data. To give just one an example of a problem - you set retain the data for 14 days and then go on a two week holiday. After you leave the office on the Friday evening the backups start to fail and the issue is not resolved (or perhaps even noticed) whilst you are away. On the Monday morning of your return (so actually over 16 days later ) a disaster affects one of your servers - if you have NOT changed the option to keep the last set, then you should be able to restore from the Thursday  before you went on holiday, but if you have changed this option then no backup (on disk) will exist.

I have the same problem.
I searched the internet but I could not find a solution. disk capacity is about to fill

We had massive problems with BE16 for six months, since July 2017.  We use HPE StoreOnce as a dedup location and it uses a OST plugin.  We upgraded the plugin and our backup performance dropped through the floor - our jobs kept saying “Loading Media”.  Cut a very very long story short, Veritas engineering had to get involved and they built a new DLL, whilst the DLL hadnt gone through any QA we were that desperate we asked for it and applied it, lo and behold backups returned to thier original, if not better, performance.

The reason im posting this as a reply is that part if the issue we had is that none of our expired backupsets never got deleted.  Since applying the new DLL our backupsets are being automatically expired and deleted fine.

Apparently the new DLL will be part of the next Feature Pack, but i have no idea when that is going to be released.