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ATI 2015 How to delete an individual backup file

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I'm using ATI 2015 with build 6613.  I created a new backup called ASUS Full Backup V3 because there were changes I wanted to make to a backup called ASUS Full Backup V2.  I'm not ready to delete ASUS Full Backup V2 and all of its backup files, but I need to make space on my external hard drive for the next ASUS Full Backup V3 backup file.  I was looking for a way to delete individual backup files from Backup V2 and haven't found anything.  I know using file explorer to delete the files will cause problems with ATI's metadata.  Is there a way to do this or do I just have to delete Backup V2 and all of the backup files?

Gary

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Gary, if your backups are incrementals then you should keep all of these if you want the backup version chain to be usable for a future restore.

With incremental backups, you could delete the latest backup files, i.e. say your version chain has a full backup plus 10 incrementals, then you could delete say backup number 8, 9 & 10 and still have a restorable version chain.  What you cannot do is delete backup number 5 and leave a gap in the chain with later backups following, in such a case then only backups 1 to 4 would be usable.

With differential backups, each backup contains all changes since the initial full backup upto the date of the differential, so you can delete any unwanted differentials and still be able to restore from any that remain provided the full backup is present.

For any of the above actions, if you delete backups manually, then you should run a Validation for the backup task that created the deleted backups to allow ATIH to reconcile the database information with the remaining backup files.  You will be given messages for each deleted backup file that you will need to tell ATIH to ignore.

One other alternative for your situation would be to copy all the older backup version chain to another drive then validate the task.

Hi Steve,

Because I know the type of backup I forgot that anyone else won't know if they were full, incremental, or differential backups.  These are full backup files.  I would think manually deleting one and then running a validation would reconcile the database information.  I'll wait for a reply before proceeding.

Gary

Gary, with full backups life is much simpler and you should be able to do as stated to manually delete unwanted ones and then do a validation.

The recommended method of cleaning up backup files is to use the auto-cleanup rules where you can configure how many backup versions to keep or how long to keep backups.

The key to auto-cleanup is to recognise that old backups will not be removed until the next one is successfully created, so you need to have sufficient space to store x+1 where x is the number to keep.

Steve,

The manual delete and valiadtion worked.  I do use the auto-cleanup rules for my backups.  In this case, I had created a new backup V3 and no longer wanted to run V2.  I guess I should have cloned V2 to create V3 and made my changes to V3.  I believe that would have allowed me to continue using the backup file names from V2 and the V2 auto-cleanup rules.  Instead I had two separate sets of backups on the same hard drive, which caused this question.

Thanks for all of your help and quick replies.

Gary