How to delete old backups on Windows 2012 Server Backup

Question

_{Tuesday, May 31, 2016 1:43 AM}

Hi there

We have 2 Windows Server 2012 physical machine and these machine has cross synchronization in Hyper-V and also each machine has USB dedicated backup device attached to this machine. On the USB dedicated backup device, we ran a Windows Server Backup (Local backup) run once a day and we only select the VMs and Host Component for backing up and use an option for "Backup to harddisk that is dedicated for backups (recommended). 

Now we have a warning saying that the space for USB backup device is only 5% left and in this device we have 273 copies of backups (capacity 1863 GB and used space 1767 GB), so my question are:

1. Does this Windows backup will overwrite the old one by any chance automatically? Or it will throw an error if it's full?

2. If it's throwing an error, how do we deleted the old backups?

We prefer to have first option recycling/deleting the old one automatically. Option (2), we can't really see the contain of the disk .. not sure how we are going to delete old backups. Alternative, we are thinking to supply another brand new USB disk ... is that the best option?

Waiting for your feedback.

Thanks

Isadewa

All replies (3)

_{Tuesday, May 31, 2016 5:29 AM ✅Answered}

Hi Isadewa,

Thanks for your reply.

>What do you mean by "set automatic management"?

It means that you could Configure Automatic Backups with Task Scheduler

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd834883%28v=ws.11%29.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396

>We did via WBADMIN tool - Windows Server Backup (Local) tool. We did manually via GUI is that what you mean?

You could backup with GUI or WBADMIN. If you need to delete old versions, you could check the commands Wbadmin delete

Best Regards,

Mary

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_{Tuesday, May 31, 2016 3:08 AM}

Hi Isadewa,

Thanks for your post.

If you set automatic management. You no longer need to manage full and incremental backups. Instead, Windows Server Backup will, by default, create an incremental backup that behaves like a full backup. You can recover any item from a single backup, but the backup will only occupy space needed for an incremental backup. In addition, Windows Server Backup does not require user intervention to periodically delete older backups to free up disk space for newer backups—older backups are deleted automatically.

Here is the article you could take a look, it also applys to server 2012

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc772523(v=ws.11).aspx

And you could also use Wbadmin delete to delete old version backup.

Please refer to the article for more details

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc742081(v=ws.11).aspx

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/62488e7a-4638-430c-950c-e75ac42b0fa3/how-a-can-delete-old-versions?forum=windowsbackup

Best Regards,

Mary

Please remember to mark the replies as answers if they help and unmark them if they provide no help. If you have feedback for TechNet Subscriber Support, contact [email protected].

_{Tuesday, May 31, 2016 4:48 AM}

Hi Mary

What do you mean by "set automatic management"?

We did via WBADMIN tool - Windows Server Backup (Local) tool. We did manually via GUI is that what you mean?

Thanks

Isadewa