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Unfortunately, there is no straight forward process for selectively
Unfortunately, there is no straight forward process for selectively
deleteing
part of a backup set.  We recently had a lawyer in our office put some
proprietary files on a server, and then had a cow when we backed them up
for
him - wanted all of the backups deleted yesterday.  There are several
ways to
"Mickey Mouse" it, though.

One way I thought would work, but really didn't, was to point an Exclude
statement at the files in question, and then run an incremental backup.
This deleted the active files, but left an inactive copy in accordance
with
the Policy domain rules.  (Remember that a selective backup doesn't
clean up
anything - just backs up the files in question, so is of no use here).

In our case, since we wanted rid of the files in question, we created a
dummy
copy of the files in question, then ran a selective backup (twice
actually,
since "only copy" is set to 2 for this customer), and then deleted the
file
and ran an incremental.  This through away the "proprietary copies" and
kept
only the two dummies.

This doesn't exactly apply to you, since you just want rid of the files,
but
if you did use an Exclude list option, then at least the only copy would
have
an expiration date on it.

In looking at the manuals, it would appear that using a management class
might be of only limited value as well.  I say that because you can
apply a
MC to a set of files by using an Include statement, but you can't do the
same
on an Exclude statement.  Therefore you could change the rules with an
include, but then when you set an exclude statement, the files would
most
likely regress back to the default class!

Perhaps someone else has thought up a better way...... I'd say "I hope
this
helps", but I'm not sure the answer I've provided solves your
problem.....

Jerry Lawson
jlawson AT thehartford DOT com


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Subject: Client deleting files
Author:  INTERNET.OWNERAD at SNADGATE
Date:    8/14/97 5:18 PM


Hi,

Does ADSM allow a client (Windows in this case) to delete selectively
parts of a backup?  For example, if enabled by the server, the client
can delete the entire drive but how would he/she delete a directory
from the server backups?

TIA