Deleting old BKF files in the BEData folder

[wingpat]

Currently running a Backup Exec 2014 on a 2012 R2 Server

Running out of room on my NAS and looking in the BEData folder, I found .BKF files dating back to 2014. There is roughly 5 TB worth of files from June 2016 back to 2014.

Since I am running out of space, I can only backup two weeks worth of data, therefore anything prior to July this year should no longer be valid.

Is this a casewhere the console is not purging old files properly? Should I or can I manually delete those files from Windows Explorer> In the same BEData folder there arealso a few folder with the older dates in them but mostly it is the .BKF files that are remaining.

Any help would be appreciated.

[VJware]

Would not recommend directly deleting the .bkf files from the storage. Better to delete them from the Backup Exec console itself.

Have a look at this KB article as well - https://www.veritas.com/support/en_US/article.TECH182577

[pkh]

Take a look at the console, if there are no backup sets corresponding to the dates of the .bkf files, then you can manually delete them from the disk.  However, if there are backup sets corresponding to .bkf files, then you should always delete the backup sets from the console which in turn will delete them from the disk.

[wingpat]

Looking in the Backup Set on the Console, only 6 didn't show any dependency and were from 2015. All the others I see in there, are all from July this year, therefore still needed.

Regardless, I took a look at the article and can confirm that it was already set like what they are asking.

Any other thoughts?

[wingpat]

Thank you for your reply.

As stated in the other post, everything is clean in the Console under backup set.

If I understand what you are saying, it would be safe to manually delete the files using Windows Explorer? I will not proceed before hearing back on this one.

Thank you

[Colin_Weaver]

As this is a community forum, I am not really sure what your expectation is - ONLY YOU can make the decision as to whether to proceed.  All the forum members can do is give advice based on the limited information we have about your problem and the enviroment. Whilst we could say yes go ahead and delete the files - because we only have limited information it could still cause you a problem. Likewise we could say no don't do it, when in reality it might be OK to do it.

As such if you are not sure of the advice already given you should either engage some kind of Backup Exec Consultant to look at your environment and configuration carefully or consider logging an actual formal support case where we could perhaps then take a more in-depth look at the issue. (that is assuming you still have an active support agreement.)

[Colin_Weaver]

As a new piece of more general advice

A new (to Backup Exec) method for managing the renetion of disk based backup sets was introduced in BE 2012 and did have some issue against the origonal release. A number of those issues were resolved in BE 2014. However the most recent updates in this area of the product are only available in BE 15 (with FP5 that will be released very soon)

As such whilst you may still have to manually correct the current problem to avoid something similar happening in the future I would suggest you do plan to update to Backup Exec 15 FP5 once it is available.