Maintenance Tasks

Occasionally maintenanance tasks are required to keep BackupPC running correctly and to purge data. Some of these tasks are documented here.

Purging data

BackupPC does not have any built-in purging mechanisms. Sometimes hosts store more data than planned and it might be necessary to delete the data.

Each backup can be deleted individually. Refer to the Host Summary page for details about the backup numbers for each host.

Delete all files for a host as follows;

cd /var/lib/BackupPC/pc/<HOST>/
ls
rm -fR <backup_number>

The BackupPC_nightly process must now be run to prune files from pool which are no longer used. Run the following command;

/usr/share/BackupPC/bin/BackupPC_nightly 0 255

After this the space will be reclaimed. This can be checked with the df command. The UI will still display the statistic information for each backup. This can be removed as follows;

nano /var/lib/BackupPC/pc/<HOST>/backups

Use ctrl+k to remove each line matching the <backup_number> which was deleted earlier.