I'm using BE2010R3, Windows 2008 environment, and I want to recover physical drive space from B2D devices as part of cleanup after building a system and performing a number of test backups. This is actuall pretty easy for me since I'm removing *all* media before shipping my product, and I just delete the .bkf files and IMG folders with Windows Explorer after "deleting" the retired media. However I've been in more time consuming situations where I had to determine which physical files were associated with the media "deleted" from Backup Exec.
Trolling for information on the issue I found https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/deleting-retired-media and http://www.symantec.com/connect/forums/how-delete-lot-retired-media-disk, and it seems that everyone dances around the POINT of those posts, which is that deleting retired media only removes RECORDS of the media from Backup Exec, and leaves behind orphaned files without recovering any space. I suppose one could inventory the device and let nature take it's course as the imported media gets reused, but that does not accomplish the goal of recovering disk space NOW for whatever reason, and begs the question why the ability to "delete media" is included at all if you're just expected to re-use it.
Is there some "Best Practice" that can be followed for cleaning out never-to-be-used-again-media? Unless I'm missing something, there is a feature request in here: either an option when deleting media to delete the files as well (with multipe dire warning of the consequences, of course); or maybe a way to flag the files for later manual deletion, by setting a filename prefix, changing the extension, or setting a file attribute (Hidden?) or something.
