Does anyone know if there is a way of limiting the space that Windows 7 backup will use on a network drive. At the moment it seems to do a combination of full and incremental backups which is fine but without any limits. I’ve done all the usual reading and googling but I can’t find any hard facts anywhere :(. I know that it is possible to remove older backups from the GUI but I would prefer that is was automatic.

So two questions in case anyone here knows:

a. Is there a registry setting you can use to limit the number of full backups Win 7 makes so it removes the oldest ones

b. If I put a limit on the space available on the network drive does Win 7 see that and then remove the oldest backups

I could just experiment and see but I thought I would ask the source of all wisdom first 🙂

Since it’s an incremental backup I’d imagine having the drive just delete the old ones would cause inconsistency..?

Hi molgrips
Yep, so I was hoping that the backup software would do it. That’s why it does a mixture of full and incremental backups afaik.

There are loads and loads of third party backup solutions. One came with my NAS box, for instance.

An incremental backup will require the previous full backup and all the other incremental backups in between, so be careful what you delete.

Dunno about Windows 7’s backup, I’ve never used it, but running a script as a scheduled task to delete files older than ‘x’ days in a given directory would be fairly trivial. I could hack that together for you if you wanted to take that route (though doing it within the backup would be neater if that’s possible).

so be careful what you delete

Yep. I suspect I’m just going to go down the third party line as getting it wrong would be horribly painful. Thanks for the offer of the script though

It sound like there isn’t a straightforward way to do this using the build in software which is a bit what I expected.

I believe it is fixed at a percentage of free space on the target drive – you can change this figure for local disks using the vssadmin tool, but I don’t think you can for network paths.

So your option is maybe partition the network drive so that there’s less space, hence Windows will use less, but personally I always resort to a 3rd party option. I can recommend Cobian Backup – free, and reliable every time I have implemented it.

I believe it is fixed at a percentage of free space on the target drive – you can change this figure for local disks using the vssadmin tool, but I don’t think you can for network paths.

Nope, you can’t for network paths unfortunately. I was trying to avoid the suck and see but may just have to resort to that.

Thanks for the recommendation – I’ll take a look