In my experience, just removing a server doesn’t delete the files, nor reduce disk space on the system, even when you’ve gone into the BackupPC/pc/<host>/ dir and deleted the dir(s) that have a number corresponding to the backup you want to delete. The best way to remove “orphaned” files (i.e., files that do not have any other hard links), is to run:
su –s /bin/bash –c “/usr/share/BackupPC/bin/BackupPC_nightly 0 255” backuppc
What this does is, runs the BackupPC_nightly script (should have come with your copy of BackupPC) as the user backuppc, with the appropriate flags. What this script does, is it goes through all of the files in the pool, and if it’s not associated with a backup (i.e., no other hard links), it removes it. This process can take a really long time (sometimes it takes me minutes; other times, it’s taken me 12+ hours. All depends on how many files you have, and how many meet the chopping block), and possibly put a heavy load on your system while doing it, so be forewarned before running it.
In short, I’m not sure of a way to check ahead of time whether there’s files that are “cruft”, but you can be sure that after running this script, the number of “cruft” files will be zero.
Thanks,
--Mark
From: Kris Lou [mailto:klou AT themusiclink DOT net]
Sent: Wednesday, April 15, 2015 3:58 PM
To: General list for user discussion, questions and support
Subject: Re: [BackupPC-users] How to manage disk space?
On Wed, Apr 15, 2015 at 12:00 PM, Dave Sill <de5-backuppc AT sws5.ornl DOT gov> wrote:
A corollary would be: how do I know that the space BackupPC is using
doesn't include a bunch of cruft like files from systems that have been
removed from BackupPC, or file systems that have been removed, ...
Somebody might have a script to check this, but you may have some backups that are lacking configured hosts. As I recall, when you delete a host from the interface, the data needs to be manually removed (and I believe there is a notification alluding to this). However, if it's just file systems, the files are likely pooled in other backups.
