How to purge old Backup to Disks with Backup Exec

[farquea]

We use backup exec and store daily, weekly and monthly backup to disks. The problem is there doesnt appear to be any form of cleanup process implemented (we inherited this system)

 

So is there a usual way to remove old backups? im thinknig i just go in my backup folder and look for all files and folders created on a date of a backup i know i no longer need or is there a risk of breaking any of the other backups doing this?

[zag]

Backupexec works using protection days.

 

Just create the backup to disk folders and tell it to overwrite after 30 days.

 

It will use the same BKF files just overwrite the older data.

[detjo]

I had mine overwriting after 30 days but it got messy.

With backup-to-disk it creates a whole bunch of 'Media' files that seem to be treated differently to tapes. With tapes you have Tape1 = Media1 etc and it could essentially work the same with backup-to-disk files but it doesnt seem to want to work the same.

We have 4 external drives that we back-up to. I created a device pool with all 4 drives added to it - then we just rotate the disks on a 4 weekly cycle.

All the old 'Media' files that are on a disk, when we come to use the disk again, get deleted thru Win Explorer. In BackupExec we just drag those files to 'Retired Media' and deleted them from there ... then it never wants to use them again.

[farquea]

at the moment i am going into Media on backup exec and finding the IMG files thyat are overwriteable and dated from a few months back. I'm selecting the group that correspond to a certain period and moving them to "Retired Media" and deleting them then deleting them in windows explorer as it says in the Symantec Documentation.

 

Does this method also then delete the B2D files that are linked to those IMG files or not as i dont seem to be freeing up much space on my drive doing this?

[sjatkn]

Does this method also then delete the B2D files that are linked to those IMG files or not as i dont seem to be freeing up much space on my drive doing this?

 

No, in 10d it doesn't delete the backup files, you need to go and delete those manually. I increased the size of by backup files from 1G to 50G which made the procedure easier because there are less backup files and less likely to have any left lying around anyway.

Edited October 6, 2010 by sjatkn

[zag]

Be carefull with increasing the size of the files though. I had a case where the backup only half completed for a couple of weeks and I needed a specific file. Unfortunately because I had changed them to 20gb segments it had deleted one of those and all the data. I would much rather it have only deleted a 1gb section