Feature request: Delete files from backup archives

[Daniel N.]

I would like to request a feature.

Sometimes very large files are backed up, because I didn't delete or remove them before the backup started. I know there is a filtering option to exclude certain files or folders, but in certain cases that is not the solution I am looking for.

Would it be possible to let me delete files from within the backup archives in the future?

[Dima P.]

I’d rather stick to the exclusions – providing such functionality means supplying the end user with the ability to delete something he or she really needs from the backup file and making it useless.

[Vitaliy S.]

Yes, I agree with Dima. Deleting any data from backups creates a huge issue for compliance and security polices.

[Daniel N.]

Okay, thanks for the response!

[marama]

I'd like to bump this, as we actually need this feature in order to comply with compliance as some (personal/private) data we're backing up should be deleted after certain amount of time. I know, for the future I could set up multiple jobs with different exclusions and have the split backup, but as it happens I'm sitting on a bunch of old backups I need to delete some files from. The only wy to do it would be restore, delete and then backup again ;(.

[Dima P.]

Marama,

I wonder why you want to delete certain files instead of deleting the backup file completely.

[marama]

I went looking for the possibility to delete specific files when the customers we do stuff for, put in the new contract that we should't archive anything on our servers. Otherwise we would need to comply with very high security standards, invest lots of money... until then it was no issue. So now I have 2 years of backups of company data and I can either breach the contract and hope nothing happens, or delete all the backups, including the 99% of the other ones that we want to keep. Sure, I've learned the lesson to split the backup jobs as much as possible and you might argue it was a bad decision to put everything in single backup, but I can imagine a lot of scenarios where people decide they want to delete only specific files from the backup.

[Dima P.]

Thanks. One more question – how you identify what files should be erased from the backup? Is that somehow documented?

[marama]

Thanks. One more question – how you identify what files should be erased from the backup? Is that somehow documented?

In our case, it's about MySQL dumps, so it's one file per database, created by the script so the filepath is always the same (few dumps a day), and they are all in the same folder of the backedup guest system.
So it would be awesome to have the ability to delete specific file/path from the specific VM on all the backups, but in our case it's only some 5-6 backups, so I manually deleting would also work for me.

The other thing... I'm writing this from EU, and we have some very strict laws on what data are we allowed to keep for how long. For example we have a video surveillance and the cameras point at the employees should not archive the videos for longer then 3 days, the ones point at management office are allowed to archive longer (with consent). So I'd like to have a purge script delete the files before the GFS kicks in.
I can imagine having multiple vmdk-s for different scenarios and having multiple jobs with excluding vmdks... but the point is there is regulation besides contracts with customers as well as many scenarios where people decide they want something removed from the archives. For example if an employee leaves the company, and he tells us he keps some personal stuff on the fileserver, we should be able to delete the files from the archives as well.
We

[Dima P.]

marama,

Your feedback and personal experience will be definitely discussed with the team. Thanks a lot answering my questions!