Let's say you have to purge and clear your old backup files from Bacula. Going through them one by one is a lengthy process (especially if you have to-disk backups):
The long way: in bconsole, type:
*delete
You have the following choices:
1: volume
2: pool
3: jobid
*volume
Defined Pools:
1: Default
2: File
3: Scratch
4: alt-pool
+---------+------------+-----------+--------------+-----------+---------------------+
| MediaId | VolumeName | VolStatus | VolRetention | MediaType | LastWritten |
+---------+------------+-----------+--------------+-----------+---------------------+
| 1 | ALT0001 | Full | 1,209,600 | File | 2015-10-05 00:03:02 |
+---------+------------+-----------+--------------+-----------+---------------------+
Enter *MediaId or Volume name: ALT0001
Finally you get a confirmation: are you sure? (yes/no). That's 5 steps! If you need to delete 50 volumes, you'll be in for a while. Luckily, bacula has some shortcuts:
delete yes volume=ALT0001
The above command will achieve you the same results in 1 step and quickly delete as many volumes as needed.
PS: For those who don't know, Bacula is an open-source, enterprise grade backup suite, running on Windows and Linux.