Completely Remove a Computer

Support
#1

We are pulling one of our computers out of service. No need to replace it. Can a specific computer’s backup be removed from the remote storage? If so, how?

Using Backblaze B2 with Duplicacy on both Linux & Windows systems

#2

Yes, it can.

I’m assuming that you have multiple computer’s backing up into the same storage, but each computer has their own backup ID(s). Perhaps only one, perhaps more than one, but unique to that computer.

Let’s say that your computer uses the backup ID Comp1234. Then you proceed as follows:

  • Run the check command on the backup storage and see, what the lowest and highest revision for that particular backup ID is. Let’s say the lowest is 1 and the highest is 2378.
  • Run the prune command on that backup storage. Since you appear to use web-ui, create a job with prune step and edit the parameters to be something like -id Comp1234 -r 1-2378.
  • The first time you do this, I would actually add the -dry-run parameter and run it once with that to make sure that you’re pruning the correct backup id. If everything checks out, remove the “-dry-run” parameter and run the job again.
  • If that computer has more than one unique backup-ID on the storage, repeat this process for all other backup-IDs of that computer.

You can execute the prune from any computer that has access to the storage. However I would make sure that the storage of the computer that is being retired gets wiped, so all the access to that storage is removed for good.

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#3

Alternative solution:

  1. Delete the ./snapshots/snapshot-name folder. You can do it using B2 web interface or using any third party tool such as Transmit or CyberDuck. This will logically remove the backup history.
  2. Run prune -a -exhaustive on the storage to remove orphaned chunks (this will actually free the storage)

To be clear: the approach @tangofan has outlined (followed by second prune to actually free space) is the politically and ideologically correct way to do that using the facilities Duplicacy provides and therefor it will always work correctly.

The approach in this comment relies on an implementation detail (that snapshot ids and snapshots map to folders and files) but requires less work and may end up using less time; in addition it will result in the folder being deleted to nothing in the storage reminds of the decommissioned machine.

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