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Can I delete old snapshots?

William Silva da Rosa 21 Reputation points
2021-03-07T13:44:39.283+00:00

Hello!
I have a Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V, and 5 VMS on Hyper-V.
One of these VMS have two snapshots from 04/16/2016 that counts 276 GB. My full backup of the server is 526 GB, that is almost a half of my backup, and it takes my backup time to 7 hours...
My question is:

I arrived in my job as Support Analyst in August 2020, and since this time I am finding every kind of poorly things...

Examples:

  1. These two larges snapshots that I think doesn't serve for nothing?!
  2. Backup from olds VMS... The schedule backup (1 day a month) that the guy before me maked is from old VMS, that are turned off... The news VMS that are running doesn't had backup. Hilarious...
  3. A many other things...

But, the really question:

Now the VM is on, working fine, three snapshots:

  1. 04/16/2016
  2. 04/16/2016 a little after
  3. 03/06/2021 - the last one, this I did

I want to delete these two snapshots from 2016, for the backup run really much faster (a half of the size)...

But I don't want to lose anything in the VM, files, changes, etc.

The database the system in this VM use is Oracle and the backup from this server is fine. So, I think if I have a snapshot from 2021, I can delete these two snapshots from 2016 and everything is run fine, because I have the snapshot from 2021, and the "Now". I think every change since the last snapshot from 2016 is saved in "now". Correct?

Thank you for the help! I really appreaciate your help!

Windows for business | Windows Client for IT Pros | Storage high availability | Virtualization and Hyper-V
Accepted answer
  1. fzb 126 Reputation points
    2021-03-07T14:03:02.623+00:00

    You can delete the snapshots. however, consider that hyperv 2008 will do a offline merge, so the space the snapshots take is only reclaimed after the vm is shut down. this process takes some time, so you will need a maintenance window for that.
    the snapshots are differencial disks in a chain, so the 2016 snapshots arent superseeded by the new one and need to be merged (by hyperv) and not just thrown away (see here )

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  1. S.Sengupta 24,636 Reputation points MVP
    2021-03-07T13:54:08.41+00:00

    Select Virtual Machine > Snapshots.
    Select the snapshot to delete. Option. Action. To select multiple adjacent snapshots. Shift-click. To select multiple snapshots that are not adjacent. Command-click.
    Click Delete.
    Click Delete to confirm that you want to delete the snapshot.

    See also:

    "Failed to lock the file or One or more disks are busy" deleting virtual machine snapshots (2017072)

    1 person found this answer helpful.

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