Cannot get purge to work

#1

I would like to delete all copies of a file that was backed up from my Linux /home directory to a Dropbox backend. Let’s say the file is called unwanted_file.txt, so I have run the following in terminal:

duplicati-cli purge dropbox://home?authid=MyAuthID unwanted_file.txt --dbpath=/home/user/.config/Duplicati/12345678901234567890.sqlite --dry-run

but I get the following error:

ErrorID: PurgeWouldRemoveEntireFileset
Refusing to purge 138852 files from fileset with ID 1, as that would remove the entire fileset.

I don’t understand this. The file has only been backed up 3 times, and this numbers suggests the command wants to delete all files in my /home backup. Trying something similar in the GUI commandline and the process seems to simply never end; I let it run for over 2 hours and it still said “Running …” with --dry-run.

How can I simply delete these 3 file backups?

#2

Does it help if you prefix the filename like this: --include=unwanted_file.txt

#3

No, I tried it and got the exact same error:

ErrorID: PurgeWouldRemoveEntireFileset
Refusing to purge 138852 files from fileset with ID 1, as that would remove the entire fileset.
#4

What version are you using? Version 2.0.4.31 fixed a bug involving purging on Linux that would remove too many files.

#5

In my test environment, the purge command did not give any output.

When using the commandline tools from the GUI, you have to specify the passphrase (--passphrase="mypassword"), because there is no way to provide it when the operation is running.

Duplicati stores the complete path for each file and folder and it expects a complete path as input for operations like purge. Wildcards are allowed.
Replace unwanted_file.txt with "*/unwanted_file.txt" (including double quotes).

1 Like
Dry-run Flag Not Documented Correctly