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Deleting subclients: does it cause jobs/backups to be deleted or is it ok to freely delete subclients that are not needed anymore??

  • 1 March 2023
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Userlevel 2
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I don’t have links, and I don’t want to call anyone out even if I did :) but I’ve read/heard/seen 2 answers this this and am wondering if this applied to all subclients, or there are exceptions, or caveats to deleting subclients.  Which is “true”, assuming you already had some backups existing for a subclient/backups set/application?

  1. You can delete subclients all day long, nothing is lost in terms of existing job history/restorability.  The backups/backup jobs/data/references/etc are not associated with the subclient(s) but instead are associated with the backup set that the subclients are in (meaning: the subclients are “children” of the backup set).  When you delete a subclient, it is still ‘visible and accessible for restores” vis the backupset backup history

OR

  1. Deleting subclients causes loss of the backup job data. Once subclients are deleted, you cannot go back to view jobs or perform restores. deleting a subclient will remove it from the backupset.  A deleted subclient and all its data/jobs are ‘gone”, never to return

Addendum: When I say “delete the subclient” I DO NOT mean deleting the client (which would then, technically, delete the backup set and subclient). I literally only mean manually/purposefully deleting only the subclients and leaving the backup set and all “levels” above it active/licensed.

Notes:

  • I’ve read the “default” subclient is not able to be removed unless you use the scripting API, so its “special” somehow.  This might only apply to the Filesystem subclients?
  • When I say “subclient” I mean literally “every subclient type” meaning: Filesystem, database, Exchange, HANA, etc. literally any and every subclient type of any application/package/backupset that performs backups of data. Just in case there are “exceptions’ and some subclients so not act like others, maybe someone will point them out.
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Best answer by Scott Moseman 3 March 2023, 18:30

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Userlevel 6
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Deleted sub clients generally just move to the default’s history. 

Userlevel 6
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Deleting Subclients does NOT delete the data.
The jobs are retained at the BackupSet levels.

Thanks,
Scott
 

Userlevel 2
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Is the “default” tied closely to the backupset? like is the defaultbackupset literally just a “view” into the default subclient (and thus why deleting a sublclient “...just move to the default’s history” as well as “The jobs are retained at the BackupSet levels”, or are the jobs literally contained/retained at the backupset level, and the default is just special in some other way?

Userlevel 6
Badge +17

Is the “default” tied closely to the backupset? like is the defaultbackupset literally just a “view” into the default subclient (and thus why deleting a sublclient “...just move to the default’s history” as well as “The jobs are retained at the BackupSet levels”, or are the jobs literally contained/retained at the backupset level, and the default is just special in some other way?


The BackupSet is where the jobs are ultimately kept.  It’s the bucket for all the data.  The Subclients are merely ways of defining specific content for backup jobs which are capturing data for the BackupSet.  View jobs from the BackupSet level and you will see all the jobs from every Subclient.

If you delete a Subclient, the jobs do NOT get associated with the “default” Subclient.  The jobs will remain visible from the BackupSet level. User-defined Subclients and the “default” Subclient will have different content defined, so it wouldn’t be logical to merge job history.

Thanks,
Scott
 

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