borg-delete - Delete an existing repository or archives
Contents
Description
This command deletes an archive from the repository or the complete repository.
Important: When deleting archives, repository disk space is not freed until you run borgcompact.
When you delete a complete repository, the security info and local cache for it (if any) are also
deleted. Alternatively, you can delete just the local cache with the --cache-only option, or keep the
security info with the --keep-security-info option.
When in doubt, use --dry-run--list to see what would be deleted.
When using --stats, you will get some statistics about how much data was deleted - the "Deleted data"
deduplicated size there is most interesting as that is how much your repository will shrink. Please note
that the "All archives" stats refer to the state after deletion.
You can delete multiple archives by specifying their common prefix, if they have one, using the --prefixPREFIX option. You can also specify a shell pattern to match multiple archives using the --glob-archivesGLOB option (for more info on these patterns, see borg_patterns). Note that these two options are
mutually exclusive.
To avoid accidentally deleting archives, especially when using glob patterns, it might be helpful to use
the --dry-run to test out the command without actually making any changes to the repository.
Examples
# delete a single backup archive:
$ borg delete /path/to/repo::Monday
# actually free disk space:
$ borg compact /path/to/repo
# delete all archives whose names begin with the machine's hostname followed by "-"
$ borg delete --prefix '{hostname}-' /path/to/repo
# delete all archives whose names contain "-2012-"
$ borg delete --glob-archives '*-2012-*' /path/to/repo
# see what would be deleted if delete was run without --dry-run
$ borg delete --list --dry-run -a '*-May-*' /path/to/repo
# delete the whole repository and the related local cache:
$ borg delete /path/to/repo
You requested to completely DELETE the repository *including* all archives it contains:
repo Mon, 2016-02-15 19:26:54
root-2016-02-15 Mon, 2016-02-15 19:36:29
newname Mon, 2016-02-15 19:50:19
Type 'YES' if you understand this and want to continue: YES
Name
borg-delete - Delete an existing repository or archives
Options
See borg-common(1) for common options of Borg commands.
argumentsREPOSITORY_OR_ARCHIVE
repository or archive to delete
ARCHIVE
archives to delete
optionalarguments-n, --dry-run
do not change repository
--list output verbose list of archives
-s, --stats
print statistics for the deleted archive
--cache-only
delete only the local cache for the given repository
--force
force deletion of corrupted archives, use --force--force in case --force does not work.
--keep-security-info
keep the local security info when deleting a repository
--save-space
work slower, but using less space
Archivefilters-PPREFIX, --prefixPREFIX
only consider archive names starting with this prefix.
-aGLOB, --glob-archivesGLOB
only consider archive names matching the glob. sh: rules apply, see "borg help patterns". --prefix
and --glob-archives are mutually exclusive.
--sort-byKEYS
Comma-separated list of sorting keys; valid keys are: timestamp, name, id; default is: timestamp
--firstN
consider first N archives after other filters were applied
--lastN
consider last N archives after other filters were applied
See Also
borg-common(1), borg-compact(1)
Synopsis
borg [common options] delete [options] [REPOSITORY_OR_ARCHIVE] [ARCHIVE...]
