Manually Removing Backups from Remote Storage

NOTE:

Data in Remote Storage should NEVER be manually manipulated when a backup or restore process is running.

Configuration and database backups stored in Remote Storage are rotated automatically based on your Flowmon Backup settings. You should not need to remove them manually.

Flow data backup is incremental and older flow data is never deleted automatically. If you must remove old flow data backups from Remote Storage to reclaim used storage space, you must do it manually. Read the following description and follow the data removal instructions.

Backed-up data is saved in the machine-id directory on Remote Storage. It contains a flow_data directory and other directories named after backup execution times.

The flow_data directory contains incrementally backed-up flow data with subdirectories in the following format: 

[profile_group]/profile/channel/one_day_of_data.tar

It also contains a hidden metadata file named .flow_backup.json. All files and folders in the flow_data directory can be safely deleted, except the .flow_backup.json metadata file.

For example, it is possible to delete flow data no longer needed within each channel or remove an entire profile or profile group.

To delete all flow data from May 2020 from All Sources - 127-0-0-1_p3000, the following files should be removed

flow_data/live/127-0-0-1_p3000/2020-05-*.tar

To delete all flow data from April 2020 from the profile-e781e1 profile (a human-readable name of the profile can be obtained using sudo backup -t ''*) and the chan-db932c98 channel, the following files should be removed:

flow_data/profil-e781e1/chan-db932c98/2020-04-*.tar