Rescue and Recovery: How To Delete Backups

[Andy]

I've searched the forum and can't find the answer to my question, so please forgive me if it's already out there somewhere.

I naively began relying on Rescue and Recovery to back up my T60 running Vista with a 100MB HD. Then one day I noticed that my free space had dwindled to less than 10GB. Some research led me to rrutil.exe, which I've used with the command

rrutil -bs

to determined that at the moment my backups on the drive are down to "only" 36GB.

I've already reduced the space the backups are using by taking "local hard drive" off the "backup locations" list in R&R's "Set schedule and preferences screen; when I did that, the program moved some of the backups onto my USB drive. (I have to say, R&R seems to be one of the most unfriendly programs I've ever used, but I guess it's designed for a corporate environment where IT gurus configure and distribute it rather than simple software engineers like me.) When I took "local hard drive" off the locations list, the program began moving the backups. A thunderstorm was approaching and the program provided no functional progress indicator, so eventually I clicked "cancel", and now I really can't tell what state my backups are in.

Anyway, I'd really appreciate some guidance as to how to recover all the space R&R is consuming on my hard drive, and how to determine whether I have complete backups on my USB drive.

Thanks,

Andy

[GomJabbar]

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=30458

[Andy]

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=30458

Thanks, rrcmd delete location=L is running as I type.

Well, that defaulted to Level=5, which apparently only deleted one backup set. It's hard to believe Lenovo ships these boxes with such a powerful hard-drive-consumer as Rescue & Recovery with no warnings or usable documentation.

Anyway, many thanks for the pointer. It looks like I'll be able to clean the system up. Sure is slow, though!

Andy

[ashleys]

I always delete backups by using the delete backups option from the Advanced drop down list in RnR itself.

[Andy]

I always delete backups by using the delete backups option from the Advanced drop down list in RnR itself.

Well how about that, it turns out RnR has two different user interfaces. Come to think of it, I have seen the fancier interface before, I just seem to forget about it each time I need it.

I've always accessed RnR through the "ThinkVantage Productivity Center" shortcut on my desktop, which I'm now going to rename "ThinkVantage Productivity Destruction Center." If you open it from the program menu instead, you gain access to the front-end tool that includes the "Advanced" menu.

Still, whoever designed this program wasn't seeing it through this user's eyes. I have the "Advanced / Delete Backups" dialog open now, and sure enough, it lists a bunch of backups. Unfortunately for my purposes the backup list doesn't tell me where the backups reside....

Anyway, I managed the job with the command-line utility. This program is really frustrating because it seems to be quite a robust backup system that's just missing the last 5% of features that would make it really usable.

Andy