Deleting old backups from Windows Backup Sets

Although you can do this via the control panel >> Windows Backups - if you are using a thrid party product that is utilizing the Windows Backup engine you will need to use the wbadmin tool.

I was recently required to clear out several older windows backups to free some space on the disk.

Firstly we can  view all backups within a backup set with something like:

wbadmin get versions -backupTarget:"B:\"

(where B: is the root of the backup.)

We can use the vssadmin tool to list all of our VSS backups with:

vssadmin list shadows /for=b:

and delete the oldest VSS backup using diskshadow in interactive mode:

diskshadow
delete shadows oldest b: