The only way is through the VAC or through SQL and it all really depends on what your storage is, and whether or not you use Discovery Accelerator.
If you use Discovery Accelerator you may have items that are on legal hold, or the archives themselves may be involved in a search, if that is the case then the archives will be placed in the VaultInterest table and that will stop the archive from being deleted.
The only way to delete an archive that has either a legal hold or is in the vault interest is to delete the search case within DA and then this will remove the legal holds and the VI table, but depending on the case, that may not be feasible.
Also it depends on whether you have retention categories that do not permit deletes, if an archive has an item in a retention category that does not permit deletion, the archive will not delete and you will get an error from storage delete telling you the archive name, why it couldn't be deleted and the retention category with the hold placed against it.
Also if you have something like a Centera with governance/compliance mode or a netapp with ontap or what not, you may find that the items cannot be deleted and you will just be flooded with storage delete errors each and everytime the storage service restarts.
But if you are to do it through sql, you would just update the Archive table to have an archivestatus of 4 and then either restart storage or put it in and out of backup mode, however be careful with how many you set as you could cause resource conflicts as storage delete will try and plough through them all.
If you use Collections on anyof the partitions, don't expect to see too much space reclaimation.
The only supported way is through the VAC
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