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If you’re like many others, over the past few months you’ve noticed that if you configure Azure Backup, you can’t delete the vault for 14 days until after you stop backups. This is due to Soft Delete for Azure Backup. It doesn’t cost anything to keep those backups during that time, and it’s honestly a great safeguard to accidentally deleting backups and gives the option to “undelete”. Though, in some cases (mostly in lab environments) you just want to clear it out (or as was affectionately noted by a colleague of mine, “nuke it from orbit”). Let’s walk though how to do that real quickly.

When you go and stop backups and delete the data you’ll get the warning “The restore points for this backup item have been deleted and retained in a soft delete state” and you have to wait 14 days to fully delete those backups, you’ll also get an email alert letting you know.

To remove these backups immediately we need to disable soft delete, which is a configuration setting in the Recovery Services Vault. DO NOT DO THIS UNLESS YOU ABSOLUTELY MUST. As previously noted, this is a greats safeguard to have in place, and I would also suggest using ARM Resource Locks in production environments in addition to soft delete. If you’re sure though, we can go turn it off.

Alright, now that we’ve disabled Soft Delete for the vault, we have to commit the delete operation again. This means first we’ll need to “undelete” the backup, then delete it again which this time won’t be subject to the soft delete policy.

Now we can go delete it again, after which we can find that there are no backup items in the vault.

Success!!! The backup is fully deleted. So long as there are no other dependencies (policies, infrastructure, etc.) you can now delete the vault.

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Thanks!