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My client is looking to reduce the number of VM backups stored in their Azure Recovery Services Vault (RSV) since total storage exceeds 100+ TB in each environment and costs are adding up. Each RSV backs up anywhere from 25-30 Azure virtual machines.

I'm not sure what the requirements are for number of backups to be kept but it looks like the various backup policies created have 180 day, 12 month and 3 year retention policies set for the backup points. Other policies vary in total day, months and years so its kind of a mess.

If I select on of the VM's in the Azure Portal and the 'Backup' option I see the available backups but no option to delete. If I select the RSV then choose 'Backup Items' and one of the VMs I can see all the VMs that are backed up and an option to stop backups and 'Delete Backup data'. I'm not sure if this will delete all backed up data though (which I don't want to do).

Ideally I'd like a way to first remove backups older than 12+ months and adjust from there. If I modify the existing backup policies to only keep let's say 1 months worth of backups, will that delete all the backups older than 1 month or will the policy apply to backups from the point I made the update (meaning 1-2 year old backups will still be kept)?

Any suggestions on how best to manage and reduced these VM backups in Recovery Services Vault would be greatly appreciated!

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  • Maybe you do something powershell: Disable-AzRecoveryServicesBackupProtection and Get-AzRecoveryServicesBackupItem
    – Ace
    Jul 15, 2022 at 0:17

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I found that modifying our existing policies and decreasing the retention policies, ex: disabling yearly, monthly, weekly and keeping only 14 days worth of backups deleted the older copies of backups we had stored. Stopping VM backups and selecting to delete data removes all backed up data, you can't keep some of it. If you have soft delete enabled before doing this you will need to wait 14 days for the backed up data to fully delete itself. I also found that you can't stop backups on a VM connected to one RSV and point it to a new RSV. You have to delete the backup data in the existing vault and point it to a new vault. Hope this is useful for some out there.

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