Delete command doesn't seem to be deleting old back ups

Support
1

Hey y’all, new to Duplicati and was moving files around and had to change my configuration. In doing so I accidentally backed up a set of folders containing 100+ gb of files I don’t need and took up enough space that I can’t run another back up.

Duplicati lists 3 back-ups so I initially tried using the delete command and doing --version=1-2 This deleted some blocks but very few only clearing up about 10gb. So I decided to just delete everything and start with a fresh back up and ran --version=0-2 and also tried --version=0 but this was unable to find anything to delete.

On the home screen it still lists 3 versions of back ups, even after a restart and I can’t find a way to just delete it all to start fresh.

2

Welcome to the forum @AFinn

From where? GUI Commandline is usually safer because it uses the job’s needed options, like

Command Line Interface CLI

Each command also requires the option --dbpath=<path to local database>, but if this is not supplied, Duplicati will use a shared JSON file in the settings folder to keep track of which database belongs to each backup. Since there is no state given, the remote url is used as a key, because it is expected to uniquely identify each backup. If no entry is found, a new entry will be created and subsequent operations will use that database.

but if you used non-GUI CLI without --dbpath, I would have expected it to not delete anything.

If you have access to the destination folder, usually it’s fastest to delete that however one can. Duplicati Database screen has a Delete button. After using it, next backup will do a fresh start.

If you don’t have manual access to destination. Duplicati can delete everything, but it requires

  --allow-full-removal (Boolean): Allow removing all filesets
    By default, the last fileset cannot be removed. This is a safeguard to make sure
    that all remote data is not deleted by a configuration mistake. Use this option
    to disable that protection, such that all filesets can be deleted.
    * default value: false
3

Following doesn’t really tackle the original issue but I found (at least up to 2.1.0.5_stable) that the information on the home screen is not updated after deleting a backup (but you would see the change when it refreshes after the next backup).

If that only occurred for the last trial, it might be that the trial using –version=0-2 was already successful, thus there were no more data to be deleted and just the information in the interface have not been updated yet - did you check whether there are still files present at destination?

1 Like