Delete backup from Media Set - user's guide

[leopod]

Here's a quote from the recently available retro 8 mac user guide (page 50) that troubles me, particularly the bolded part :

 

You can change or turn off a disk Media Set’s grooming options at any time. If you want to protect backups from specific points in time, you can “lock†them to prevent Retrospect from grooming them. You can also select specific backups not groomed by policy to manually delete from the Media Set.

 

Does this mean i can choose to delete a specific backup from a Media Set? If so, i'm not sure to understand how this could be done.

[Mayoff]

Yes, you can delete past backups if you have the grooming feature turned on.

[leopod]

Thanks for the answer, but the question was more about the possibility to delete a SPECIFIC backup, not groomed by the policy. I guess it's not possible but the user guide seems to be suggesting the contrary, as per bolded quote above.

[Maser]

Yes -- you can do this.

 

Turn on Grooming for your media set. If it's been in use for a while without Grooming on, it'll take a while to update the catalog.

 

Then, when you see the specific backup in "Past Backups" for that Media Set, you can selected it and click "Remove".

 

*Then* you have to run a groom to actually remove the backup. Be sure to have the groom settings correct before you actually run the groom, though. You might set it to keep 200 backups if you are just looking to groom a set and not subject it to the "defined policy"

 

Be aware, though, that this will only remove the files *unique* to that backup.

 

If you have a file that's been on the source for multiple backups that you are trying to get rid of, you'd have to get rid of *all* the backups that could contain that source.

[leopod]

Thanks for the answer, seems to make a lot of sense now. I will eventually try this and report here.

[leopod]

I tried this today and it works as expected. I'm very happy as this can save me some valuable space when I realize after fact that something has been backed up to a disk media set by mistake. I must say the grooming process can be quite long because it scans all backups one by one and if you have 20 different sources backed up every day, you end up with hundreds of backups to scan before it actually grooms the specific backup to remove. In my case, I removed a 210GB backup out of a 100 backups using 2.5TB, and it took half an hour approximately.