We are considering implementing such an option, it's actually been discussed recently with R&D. Can't provide any more info other than that.

Are you looking to purge everything and start from scratch for that backup plan, or are you more interested in running the new retention settings purge *before* the backup plan - or as an option separate from running backup - as a way to clear out some storage before the new plan runs?

Thanks Matt.

David, I think a separate purge plan would be best, as it may not be intuitive to start a normal backup plan to purge excess data on a system. The purge plan would really be an administrative function to get back to the normal policy for that system, which might be to keep e.g the last month's backup locally.

So it is an edge case, where due to user error the local retention policy is set incorrectly and we try to get the disk space back without removing all backups.

I think if you wanted a way to kick off a Retention Purge on an existing plan without having to run a backup, that might be something we can consider. But, there's no guarantee the purge will delete anything if no files fall outside the the plan's retention settings. In your specific use case, however, you say the plan was created without any retention setting, the storage got full, you changed the plan to include retention settings, and now want to have the plan adhere to those settings before running the next backup. I think in that case, a Retention Purge option on the plan would suffice.

I'll add your comments to the requirement for the engineering team.

Cheers David!