Limit backups to just 12 days for disk based backups?

[Mark_Lynch_3]

I have 6TB of disk based storage in a media pool. I've schedule and setup backups from all my servers to folders within the medial pool. I have set the free space limit to 650GB on each backup so that I leave enough room for 1 full backup. What I can't seen to get right is deleting backups older than 12 days. I set the media policy to retain for 11 days, but as each job runs it keeps retaining the old backups - curently 20 days worth of them.

I've look at the help file and can't seem to determin how to limit the backups on disk to just 12 days worth of files.

Can someone please provide a semi detailed instruction path for deleting files older than 12 days while doing a backup to a disk based media set?

Thanks

[Dev_T]

Hello,

What is the Append Period and Overwrite protection perion of the Media set?

[pkh]

In the Devices tab,  under the Backup-to-Disk Folders section, right-click on your B2D folder and select Property.  You need to set the Maximum number of backup sets per backup-to-disk file to 12.  I presume that your job is set to overwrite, so it iwll use a new file every day.  On the 13th day, it will cycle back to the first file.  Your OPP period of 11 days is fine.

As for the 20 files that are already in your B2d folder, you would have to decide which of the extra files do you want to delete.  Then you

1) right-click on the file and associate it with Retired Media. 

2) after the file is in the Retied Media set, right-click on it and delete it.

3) use Windows Explorer and delete that file from the B2D folder.

[Ken_Putnam]

Are your jobs APPEND or OVERWRITE?   if they are all APPEND, none if the BKF files will ever expire, since they all share a common OPP date, which is reset when the latest file is closed

For Disk based backups, I recommend all Overwrite, for just this reason


Also from Options/Media Management, make sure that the option to "Reuse Overwriteable media in the target media set before scratch media" is selected.  If the other option, "Use scratch mediua before ..."  then backup Exec will continue to create new BKF files until the disk is full or the Reserver is met

[Mark_Lynch_3]

Thanks - this appears to have worked as I wanted. I see the FOLDER showing "Overwritable" now for the old files (beyond 12 days).

My mistake was that I thought "Max number of B/U sets per disk file" was the total count of files across all backups, not the number of instances of a backup - since a backup can contain more than one B2D file.

What's even nicer is that the 13+ day files are shown as Blue in the list to the left of the B2D folders, so I just selected them and clicked ERASE and they are gone. Just checked the drive free space and they are indeed deleted.

Thanks VERY MUCH!

[Ken_Putnam]

What's even nicer is that the 13+ day files are shown as Blue in the list to the left of the B2D folders, so I just selected them and clicked ERASE and they are gone. Just checked the drive free space and they are indeed deleted.


If the files are listed in blue, then BackupExec will reuse them rather than creating new BKF files (if that option is selected )  so you do not need to do any manual disk space management at all