Deleting old backup destinations

[Jon_Sumida]

I am trying to delete some network share backup destinations that are defined in BESRM.  When I open BESRM, go to the Manage Tasks tab, then the Destinations section, I see a lot of old network shares that are no longer valid. When I highlight one and select Delete it gives me a message saying:

"Error

You cannot delete the selected destination because an exisiting Backup Exec System Recovery policy or task already uses it. To delete the destination, you must first delete the policy or task that uses the destination"

I am not using these destinations anymore and I don't a policy that uses them. I have a main policy that backs up C: and this is the one they used to be associated with. However, my storage server hostname changed so I changed the backup destination but all these entries pointing to the old one still exist. I even deleted this main policy just to remove these destinations and it still won't. How do I get rid of these?

[Jon_Sumida]

I found this article:

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH153587&key=53845&actp=LIST

That seems to do the trick. It states that this is behavior of not being able to delete backup destinations is by design. But they shouldn't make it so difficult to remove them. These instructions are not logical at all. But they work.

[Jon_Sumida]

Ok, nevermind, the steps in that article do not do the trick. Not only does those instructiosn delete the old backup destinations, they also delete the client from the BESR-MS. After deleting what I thought was the old backup destinations to all my clients, I checked my inventory and they were all gone! Why is it so difficult to just do a simple task like this? It cannot be that uncommon to want to change a backup destination, but keep the rest of the policy settings the same. So frustrating.

[criley · Accepted solution]

I'm not sure why your clients got deleted as well - that should not have happened.

Before you can delete a backup destination, you have to remove all associated resources. These would be the steps needed:

1. Edit existing backup policies and change old destination to new destination

2. Right-click on a client machine that has been using the old destination and choose 'Resource Manager'.

3. Click on old destination (bottom left corner of window) and then click on 'Resource Association Grid'.

This screen shows all associated resources that need to be removed before you can delete the destination. You need to right-click and delete each one.

Hope that helps.

NOTE: I agree with you that this process is not 'user friendly'.

[Jon_Sumida]

Chris - turns out the clients get "deleted" temporarily. I checked and compared the number of computers listed in the Manage Tasks view before/after deleting a few test old destination associations. After I deleted them, shortly after the number of computers listed went down. Thinking it out, I figured it shouldn't delete the clients completely so I went to the client machines that I had "deleted" in BESR-MS and forced a check through Altiris agent and sure enough it showed up in the computer list again. But it was listed as BESR uninstalled and none of my policies assigned to it were enforced yet. Eventually they did though. So yes, that procedure does work. But it freaked me out as I had lost 80+ clients seemingly all at once. I had done a backup right before so I reverted to it, but man, they should warn you your clients will disappear temporarily. Or maybe that just happened on mine? I'll mark it as solved. 

[Dushan_Gomez]

So does this problem solved in the BESR 2010 SP2 ?

I'm waiting for the maintenance weekend before I deploy it. 

[Jon_Sumida]

Not sure it's a "problem" as the document I linked says it's working as it should. Symantec just decided to make this a difficult step. Maybe SP2 does provide something that makes it easier, but I've been unsuccessful updating to SP2 so I'm not going that route for now.