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how to delete old backups

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I have several old backups that I would like to delete. I do a full backup on 1st of each month on 3 systems. Currently I have 6 months worth of backups on one external USB drive, 18 files total.  I am running out of storage space. I would like to delete selected ones of these files but cannot figure out how to do this. 

 

Does anyone have a clue how to delete selected backup files?

 

Jerry Harper

 

0 Users found this helpful

Jerry, welcome to these user forums.

Please consider editing your post to remove your email address from this public forum unless you are wanting to attract a lot more email, mostly of the spam variety!

The recommended method of removing unwanted backups is to configure the Auto Cleanup rules for your backup tasks on your Backup Scheme settings tab.

Auto Cleanup works on the basis of complete version chains which if you only do full backups would be each full backup, otherwise is a full backup plus all associated incremental or differential backups.

You can define how many version chains to keep or how many days to keep your version chains.

Either way you need to understand that Auto Cleanup only deletes old version chains after successfully creating the next full backup of a new version chain, i.e. if you define to keep 2 version chains, then version 3 has to be successfully started before version 1 will be deleted.

When keeping version chains for x days, the count of those days does not begin until a version chain is complete - this mainly impacts those using incremental or differential chains.

Please see post: http://forum.acronis.com/forum/123411 where I dealt with a similar question about manually cleaning old backups and offered other suggestions.