Sunday, April 9, 2017

Windows Server Backup - Delete old backup

I had turned on daily backups on my Win server, and in time I had accumulated almost 1000 backups from the last 3 years. The Backup UI took ages to do any operation requiring enumeration of those (even changing the backup schedule), and unfortunately there is no easy way to delete old backups from the UI. The solution there is to use command line. Here are some useful invocations:
  • wbadmin get disks - lists the disk in system and the space used by the backups
  • wbadmin get versions - lists the backup versions
  • wbadmin delete backup -keepVersions:10 - deletes older backups, keep the last 10 backups
  • wbadmin delete backup -version:04/08/2017-10:16 - deletes the specified backup version