Regain Space After Removing Files

[blueray453]

Suppose i have removed a lot of files from /specific/folder/location. now i want to regain space. so i do the following.

borg recreate . --exclude /specific/folder/location
borg compact .
borg create ....

Is this an acceptable approach.

Is there any easier way to do this?

[ThomasWaldmann]

Suppose i have removed a lot of files from /specific/folder/location. now i want to regain space. so i do the following. borg recreate . --exclude /specific/folder/location borg compact . Is this an acceptable approach?

Yes (I did not check the precise syntax and matching though). To prevent unintended data loss, you should always add --dry-run --list to borg recreate and make very sure (by checking the output) that it really would do what you want it to do (and not e.g. exclude files that you wanted to keep). After you made sure, remove the --dry-run and run recreate again, so it actually recreates the archives.

Is there any easier way to do this?

Not if you want to keep all these archives. If you do not need all of them, you could also first delete the unwanted ones and then recreate the wanted ones.

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[blueray453]

I mean after deleting large files, there is still files in /specific/folder/location

I just want to keep one copy in all archives where it will keep the current state of /specific/folder/location

In my case: borg recreate . --exclude /specific/folder/location totally remove the folder then borg create add the current state.

Is there any command that will remove (from all archives) only the files that are not present in /specific/folder/location from /specific/folder/location.

[ThomasWaldmann]

borg is deduplicating file chunks, so it always has only 1 copy of a specific chunk in the repository - you do not need to care for that manually.

an archive contains the state of the archived files at the point in time when they were archived.

and no, there is no such command. you need to say which files/folders you want removed (you want to exclude). maybe you can do that with some scripting, generating include/exclude rules for borg.