How to Free Up Repository Space?

Question

Our repository is getting full. I need to reclaim space immediately. 
 I have shortened retention policy for a number of jobs, but it seems like it takes forever for these jobs to roll off. 
 We also had one machine that had multiple base images due to dirty shutdowns. Three days ago, I deleted the oldest, which was 3 TB. We have seen zero (0) space reclamation. 
 How do I free up space on this thing? 
 I assume that if I completely remove a machine from protection and delete all recovery points, that *might* do the trick (although at this point I'm not even sure that would do it). But obviously that's not a good solution if it's still a production machine. 
 Has anyone ever used the secret "hard delete" option? What does that do? 
 Thanks

Tim Seymour · Accepted Answer

When you delete recovery points, regardless of how you do it, (delete range, delete base image, rollup, hard delete, etc.) that marks the recovery point for deletion from the repository. You then have to wait for the background job "deleting index RPFS files" to run and actually remove the data. To see those jobs running go to the events tab -> click the gear icon to "show background service jobs" and then you will see them. If there are no actively running Deleting Index RPFS Files jobs then you need to restart the core service. That usually means that something in the delete scheduler hung or deletes were cancelled and now it is not cleaning up data. Please note that those jobs also may be blocked by other jobs. So it is very possible if you have an extremely busy core that the jobs are queued but always blocked by something else. 
 For future reference we don't ever recommend using hard delete. Hard delete will remove the recovery point that you hard delete without regard for the rest of the incremental chain. So if you hard delete a recovery point it will leave all the incrementals after that point as orphans and unusable in the repository. What we do use it for at times is to delete one volume image from a recovery point. So say you were backing up C and D on a system and you decide you want to keep C but remove all your backups of D. We would use hard delete to delete the base image of D and then use the delete orphans button to remove all the orphaned backups of D. That would leave you with your C drive backups and remove D.

How to Free Up Repository Space?

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