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Deleting old backup sets on disk storage

Susan235680
Level 4

Backup Exec 20.6, Server 2016.

I have backup sets that are months old and taking up 100's of GB on my disk storage.

I've done database rebuilds, etc. and they remain.

I cannot delete the files manually as it says I require permission.

How can I delete these old backup sets? 

I would assume deleting these would cause consistancy errors and another database rebuild would be necessary.

My backup to disk retention is supposed to be 15 hours before they expire but somehow there are sets that aren't being overwritten and my disk storage keeps maxing out, causing jobs to fail.

7 REPLIES 7

pkh
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If there are backup sets which depends on these expired backup sets, then they would not be deleted until the dependent backup sets expire.  For example, an expired full backup would not be deleted if there are incremental backups depending on it.

Also, a backup chain would not be deleted until another backup chain is started.

All backups that are run are full backups. 

Backups don't run on weekends so the sets would all expire by the next week.

Some of the several month old sets are of Hyper-V virtual machines located on the same physical machine as the backup exec server. The backup exec software is installed on the host.

pkh
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Backups don't run on weekends so the sets would all expire by the next week.

Yes, but if they are the only backups, then they would not be deleted until a new backup is taken.  Otherwise, for a period, you would not have any backups.

I still have backups from December and February when backups run when everything is expired though...

pkh
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These could be orphan backup sets. Do you see these backup sets in the Storage tab? If not, you can delete these backup sets manually.

I can see them in the storage tab but there is no option to delete. They have no dependencies or have any dependent on them.

pkh
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Expire them