Monthly Archives: July 2011

Remove SharePoint 2007 Backups

If you take a backup from Central Administration -> Operations -> Perform Backup, there’s no built-in way to remove old backups.  To clear up unwanted backups:

  • Navigate to the backup share and take a backup of spbrtoc.xml.  This file contains information about the backups.
  • Within spbrtoc.xml each SPHistoryObject node  corresponds to a backup.  Take a note of the SPDirectoryName and SPStartTime values within each SPHistoryObject  node.  SPDirectoryName is the directory the backup was stored and SPStartTime is the start time of the backup.
  • Delete the directories of the backups you wish to remove and delete the corresponding SPHistoryObject nodes from spbrtoc.xml.
  • Navigate to  Central Administration -> Operations -> Backup and restore history and the delete backups shouldn’t be visible.

Deleting Hyper-V Snapshots

An important point when deleting a Hyper-V snapshot is that the corresponding AVHD file isn’t merged into the main VHD file until you power down the server.  This means that the disk space used by the snapshot isn’t immediately available when you delete a snapshot.

As far as I’m aware there’s no way to monitor the merge process through System Center Virtual Machine Manager, but you can via the Hyper-V MMC.

If you start a virtual machine during the merge process, the merge process stops and the machine starts instantly.