Re: [Duplicity-talk] Purge individual file

[Nate Eldredge]

On Wed, 26 Mar 2014, Lee Katz wrote:

> Hi, I was wondering how to purge an individual file or files?  Our backup
> is getting too large to handle, and we have discovered many derived files
> that can be completely removed.  They can be recreated if we ever need
> them.  Can we completely remove these files from the backup and save space?

I don't think this is really possible.

The best you can do, AFAIK, is to use the --exclude* options to exclude 
those files from future backups.  Then as you remove old backups over 
time, you'll get some of that space back.  (Or, if you don't need 
historical backups, make a new full backup and remove all the previous 
backup sets.)

Actually removing those files from previous backups would require 
something along the lines of:

- Download everything from the remote repository

- Decrypt everything

- Rewrite all the difftar files, removing all members that relate to the 
unwanted files

- Rewrite all the sigtar files, removing all references to the unwanted 
files

- Recompute the hashes and rewrite the manifest files

- Re-encrypt everything

- Upload everything to the remote repository

I don't think there's anything like the middle steps in duplicity.

--
Nate Eldredge
address@hidden