Removing files within a backup set

[cmears]

Is there anyway to remove files within a backup set without having to do a restore, remove the necessary files, then backup the data again?

[pkh]

Why do you need to remove files from your backup set?  If you don't what them, just don't select them during any restore from the backup set.

[cmears]

Our retention policy is 2 years on all data.  There's many times we have backed up large data for several months and then someone decides we may not need a certain directory, etc within a backup set.  By removing that data it would save valuable space on our backup server.

[Colin_Weaver]

There is no way to remove files from an individual backup set, but as you should be running regular full backups anyway you should be able to overwrite your oldest sets and still have a 2 year old full backup.

 Also do you actually need to keep to your old backups on your backup server - surely backups this old can be on tape and removed from the libary - bear in mind you can duplicate data from a disk backup to a tape one.

You also don't need to keep 2 years of catalogs, just make sure you keep of record of which tapes are used on what dates and be prepared to run a catalog job (this will save disk use against your catalogs folder