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My Client Computer Backups folder is over 1.2TB in size. There were total of 14 workstation, which I were able to remove 10 of them and delete their backups. But that only freed up about 30GB. Now when attempting to remove or customize backups for the remaining 4 workstations, it fails with with error "Backup cannot connect to the Windows Server Essentials Client Computer Management Service". I've tried stop/restart the Windows Server Essentials Management Service, rebooted the server, rebooted the workstations, but the operation still fails.

I've manually ran Backup Cleanup from the task scheduler, which took several hours, but it didn't free up any drive space at all, and the log/history shows the process only took less than a minute although I clearly noticed the task status was in "Running" for hours.

I found a doc to manually delete the Client Computer Backups for Server 2011 Essentials, but the wss_computerbackupsvc service is not found in Server 2012 Essentials:

net stop wss_computerbackupsvc
del .\"Client Computer Backups"\*.*
net start wss_computerbackupsvc

Is there another service name for Server 2012? Or can I just delete all the files in Client Computer Backups folder?

itchibahn
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In Server 2012 Essential services, I found "Windows Server Essentials Computer Backup Service". I stopped the service, and deleted the contents in "Client Computer Backups". Once I restarted the service, it recreated the database file in its folder. Now I got that 1.2TB back. Problem solved.

itchibahn
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  • This solved also my problem: the server stopped cleaning the old client backups. I found out the service was not running, after starting it the old client backups got deleted as expected according to their retention. – hetOrakel May 18 '22 at 13:53