Managing Backups and Replicas - Deleting

[tom11011]

Hi there.

I was reading through the pdf user guide. On page 106 it references Managing Backups and Replicas but I cannot find in the product where to delete some of my backups. Can you tell me how to navigate where I can delete a few backups from the database and disk? I am aware that setting restore points will automatically do this but we are looking at possibly setting up for a huge number of restore points and it will be a while before the backups I want to delete are automatically removed.

Thanks.

[Vitaliy S.]

Sure! Just navigate to Backups node (in the management tree), and choose a backup job (on the right hand side). Thanks.

[tom11011]

ok, in the right pane, I can choose an individual vm for backup. I right click the vm, there is an option to delete from disk. If I choose this, what will happen? Will I be presented with another menu to choose which dates/restore points that I want deleted? I'm not clear what will happen when I choose "delete from disk". I don't want to delete everything, just a couple of files.

[Alexey D.]

If you choose to delete a VM, B&R will remove that VM from the whole backup chain. All other VMs stay untouched.

Blocks occupied by the deleted VM will be marked as free and will be reused to hold new data. Also note that this action does not shrink VBK file, it will be shrinked during next full pass.

[tom11011]

Ok, well I don't want to delete a whole vm, just a couple of vbk files. I have multiple vbk's from experimenting and only need one. Can I just delete the files I don't want and let the database take care of itself when it reaches its restore point?

[Alexey D.]

Tom, it is not recommended to delete VBKs manually. Your VBKs should be handled by retention policy settings only.

[Gostev]

Just reduce the retention settings (restore points count) and run the job. Older restore points will be deleted automatically at the end of the job. Thanks!

[TaylorB]

Just reduce the retention settings (restore points count) and run the job. Older restore points will be deleted automatically at the end of the job. Thanks!

What do you do when you are completely out of disk space? This has happened to me several times. You couldn't run the job because there would be no disk to write to.

[Gostev]

Delete older backup files manually. This is just more "dirty" way as configuration database records about those files will still remain, which is why this is not recommend. In all cases, those records will be cleaned up automatically with time by job's retention policy.

[tasi]

[merged into existing discussion]

The device I use as the target for veeam backups is now full and veeam backups are failing.

I've lowered the amount of restore points to try and clear up some space, but that didn't seem to work. Is there a way to manually "clean up" the number of backups so I could get some more space?

Thanks for any help.