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Cleaning up old backups

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Hi,

I made a bit of a mistake and set the wrong backup scheme and consequently ran out of hard disk space on the target system.  I've now changed the scheme to "incremental" and "create only incremental versions after first initial full version".  The question I have is that I have two large files, see attached screenshot.  I'd like to get rid of one of these if I can but I don't know if that is possible or it is just quicker to delete the backups and start again?

Thanks

Rob

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Rob, welcome to these User Forums.

I would not recommend using "create only incremental versions after first initial full version" as this carries its own risk factors, namely that you must ensure that you have every single incremental file plus the initial full backup file that these were based on, or else your backup chain will be of no value in recovering your drive should any incremental file go bad, get corrupted etc.

You can manually delete the oldest backup version chain files, i.e. all those showing _b1_ in the file name for your screen image, but you should then perform a Validation for this backup task and take the Ignore option for each deleted file that is reported in popup messages.

I would recommend using an Incremental backup scheme that creates a new Full backup after 6 Incremental files have been created (as your screen image shows you had in place) but change the Automatic Cleanup rules to "Store no more than 1 recent version chain" which would automatically delete the oldest files after a new Full backup get created (to start a new chain).
Taking this approach would reduce the risk for using incremental files by keeping only 6 such files before starting a new chain with a new full backup file.