Delete the unneeded backup

You can delete backups in the following way:

• Configure the retention policy and have the Operator delete them according to this policy rules
• Manually

Export your namespace so the commands below can use it. Replace <namespace> with your value:

export NAMESPACE=<namespace>

Configure backup retention

Use the backup.tasks.retention subsection to configure the retention policy for backups. Specify the following parameters:

• backup.tasks.retention.type - the retention strategy. The default (and currently only supported strategy) is count, which keeps the most recent backup.tasks.retention.count backups and removes older ones.
• backup.tasks.retention.count - how many backups to keep. Older backups are removed from the storage. See Retention and incremental backups below.
• backup.tasks.retention.deleteFromStorage - if to delete backup files from storage as well.

Retention and incremental backups

Two things behave differently for incremental backups:

• The percona.com/delete-backup finalizer applies to an incremental base backup and is ignored for increments. Deleting a base backup makes PBM delete every increment derived from it from the storage. The Backup resource for the base is removed, but the Backup resources for the increments remain in the Operator, because the Operator hands their deletion to PBM. This is expected to change in a future release.
• Retention counts base backups. It is ignored for increments.

Delete manually

To delete a backup manually, you need to specify the backup name. Get the name from the list of available backups returned by the following command:

kubectl get psmdb-backup -n $NAMESPACE

Sample output

backup1   some-name   minio        s3://operator-testing/2026-02-03T16:54:32Z                             logical   55.21KB   ready    16m         17m
backup2   some-name   azure-blob   azure://operator-testing/psmdb-scheduled-backup/2026-02-03T16:54:00Z   logical   49.70KB   ready    17m         17m
backup2   some-name   aws-s3       s3://operator-testing/psmdb-scheduled-backup/2026-02-03T16:54:11Z      logical   50.72KB   ready    17m         17m

Now, you can delete the desired backup as follows:

kubectl delete psmdb-backup/<backup-name> -n $NAMESPACE

Delete base backups for point-in-time recovery

You can delete a backup used as a base for point-in-time recovery (PITR) starting from the Operator version 1.15.0. Note that deleting such a backup will delete the stored operations log updates based on this backup.

Delete backups with the legacy ancestor label

Starting with Operator version 1.17.0, the backup label changed from ancestor to percona.com/backup-ancestor. The Operator deletes backups carrying the new label, but it does not remove older backups that use ancestor. Backups created with Operator versions before 1.17.0 must be removed manually to free storage.

Backups created before version 1.17.0 have the ancestor label. The Operator doesn’t automatically delete such backups according to the retention policy. You should manually delete them to free up storage.

To find and remove these legacy backups:

1. List all backups with the ancestor label:

   kubectl get psmdb-backup -l ancestor -n $NAMESPACE
   

2. Delete them:

   kubectl delete psmdb-backup -l ancestor -n $NAMESPACE
   

See also

• Disaster recovery and multi-site
• Data migration

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Last update: September 8, 2026
Created: March 13, 2023