Hello,
I am running a Windows 2008R2 server which uses Windows Server Backup to do the backups. We are using the backup-tool to create non-system state backups of the data-directories on this machine. The backup is done on a dedicated disk connected through iscsi (to a Synology box). This backup disk has become too small and we have now replaced the Synology box with a bigger one. Here i created a new LUN again for the backup purposes.
Now for my question; The wbadmin.exe tool supplied with W2008R2 does not offer a way to delete the old backups. I know that in Win2012 (which we we also have running) I could add the new iscsi location and then (when enough backups are available on the new target) use wbadmin.exe delete backup to delete the old non-system state backups; e.g.
wbadmin delete backup -version:08/07/2013-21:00
This (very undocumented) feature of Windows 2012 and higher works quite nice and is exactly what i am searching for on the W2008R2 machine; a way to delete the old backups (and under the hood delete the corresponding snapshots)
I've done quite a bit of research and it should be possible to do something similar in 2008 but then manually, The howto is described in the following link: http://blogs.technet.com/b/filecab/archive/2009/06/22/backup-version-and-space-management-in-windows-server-backup.aspx . Basically it describes that you should use DiskShadow.exe to remove e.g. the oldest snapshot with a command like :
Delete shadows OLDEST \\?\Volume{7fc1871b-2e1f-11dd-a339-001e4fb7af35}Windows Server backup (wbadmin) should then on the next run 'see' this deletion and update its list of available backups:
"You can perform the same steps manually to delete backups on demand. However, the backup catalog update cannot be done manually and it will happen instead during the next backup."
I've done this on our box and it indeed removes the shadows from the list. However, in the Windows Backup 'dashboard' it still lists the backups as available. Also after a new backup has finished (according the the article this is when it should 'update' its backup catalog). When I try to restore a backup from a date that i just removed it gives a nice message that this is impossible because the snapshot is not available (duh :)) ;
Unable to browse Local disk. The shadow copy of the backup stored on the backup destination cannot be found.
So it seems that the aforementioned method works; it removes the snapshot and frees diskspace, but it doesn't update the Windows Backup catalog. As a result the management tool (GUI) still lists the backups which are no longer available! How can i change this? Is there any way to do this? I found one article which mentions that the Dashboard bases its screen on the Windows Logs and not on the actual VSS snapshots available: http://forum.wegotserved.com/index.php/topic/23757-start-afresh-with-server-backup/ (WHS) In my situation however this seems unlikely because i don't have any logs that date back as far as my backups go.
In my opinion this is a real bug and it leaves us with a in-consequent backup schema. Does anyone have similar situations or even a solution to my problem?
Kind Regard, Martin