How to wipe all Deja Dup backups?

Question

I am unsure about what is the recommended way of wiping a Deja Dup backup. I've made a restructuring and a correction to the way my backups are made, and removed a large entity, cough rootfs, cough from my backup list. (Yes, it was silly to add it in the first place.) The problem I'm having is that Deja Dup will most probably not act in the way I want it to when I make a new backup, therefore I want to wipe all of the backed up files. They are stored on an external harddrive in its own folder. I can't reformat the whole folder, as it is also home to a couple of harddrive images.

Would the recommended method be by using "rm duplicity*" or is there a better way to do this? It would be nice if this was made simpler somehow.

Solution

It's very easy to do this, don't worry.

1. Navigate to the folder where your backups are
2. CTRL + A To select all files
3. DELETE To delete all files

A couple of observations about the files in the backup folder, in case you don't want to delete all backups:

All files can be identified as part of a full or incremental backup. Look for 'duplicity-full...' or 'duplicity-inc...' at the beginning of the file names, where the arrows are pointing in the image above.

All files can be identified by creation date in the filename, like the highlight at top left. The format is YYYY/MM/DD.

Most files in the backup directory will be simple archive files, like in the top row of the screenshot. Highlighted in the middle and bottom rows are the other two files created per backup, 'signatures' and 'manifest'. For each backup you will have many files like in the top row, and one each like in the middle and bottom row.

To delete a specific backup identify all files by date in the filename. When working in a directory deleting things, make sure you have at least one more copy elsewhere, in case you delete the wrong thing by accident.

Comments

[Sanam Patel]

It's simple, just delete the contents of the destination directory. Next time you open Deja Dup it will do a full backup of whatever folders you set it to backup, like normal.

[Admin]

An "rm duplicity*" it is then. I still think this should be simplified for less experienced users.

[Eliah Kagan]

To try to get this feature added, you might want to post about it on Ubuntu Brainstorm. @TomBrossman You should probably post your comment as an answer, as it answered Howy's question.

[Mahesh]

By the way, Things will perfectly be normal if you dont do anything. When you add folders, It makes full backup of their contents. When you remove, it stops scanning them. Already backed up things may hang around for a while.