dan wrote at about 12:36:51 -0700 on Sunday, November 22, 2009:
> I have been successfully deleting files from backups for some time. I use
> basic a basic `find <dir> -iname <name> -exec rm {} \;` to hunt down files
> and delete them. I have never had any problems recovering the data as the
> restore process doesnt have a file list it goes off of but just processes
> each file in the directory.
>
While the brute force approach may work in terms of physically
deleting the file data and recovering storage space, it fails to make
any changes to the corresponding attrib file that tracks all the file
metadata. Now that might in most cases not be a problem since if you
wipe out the data, BackupPC is probably smart enough to skip it when it
restores, but it is hardly the right way to go. Also, I imagine there
are no guarantees that the web interface will properly reflect the
change though it may be smart enough to skip files with missing data
but present attributes. At a minimum, I would imagine you would get
error messages when you restore complaining about missing data files
but if you have to restore a couple of years from now, you may not
remember if that is a file you intentionally deleted or something that
got corrupted. Also, this brute force method doesn't allow you to selectively
remove files from individual backups while keeping it in place in
other backups in the tree.
You might want to see the program I wrote BackupPC_deleteFile which
was designed to address the above issues.
It has been posted to the Wikki.
http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/backuppc/index.php?title=BackupPC_DeleteFile#Scripts
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