I’m using Exchange with Backup Exec 11d for Windows (on Windows Server 2003) and backing up our Exchange server to it.We are running extremely low on tape drive storage space and we can’t afford a new tape drive (thanks Great Recession) and so I’m doing a MacGuyver and using an external 500GB USB hard drive that we had around to run a nightly backup of our Exchange server. This setup had been working great, that is until the drive ran out of space.

When I noticed the low disk space warning, the first thing I tried was to recycle the media by putting it into scratch media but the backup didn’t seem to grab it when running, it would just sit there and ignore it. I tried to just delete the files and then ran an inventory to see if it would detect that the space is available but this just led to having a failed inventory run.

The next thing I tried was to create a new media set with a one hour retention cycle (as a test) and still Backup Exec wouldn’t overwrite the data. I even tried rebooting but the media still said it was available in the Backup Exec management console. Argh!

At last I figured it out and the way to get rid of the media files was to move the Backup Exec media that needed deletion to the “retired media” media set and then deleting it from there. I then paused the backup to disk folder from the devices tab in the Backup Exec manager, and then unpaused it. Space is now available again and crisis averted.