the following happened to me: i made a backup to an external usb hard disk. The usb disk filled up and the backup was interrupted in kopia.
Now i wanted to delete this snapshot. but i can’t, because kopia tells me, that there is no space left on the disk when i try to delete.
And now?
Well… I just looked at that problem and decided to check it out on a small test repo on an external drive. I was actually not filling the drive, but instead tried to determine, what files would be “safe” to delete from the drive.
Of course this is only a general approach and one would have to play close attention, but what worked for me was this:
run a snapshot
find the latest files in the repo’s folder hierachy
remove some of them
run snapshot fix invalid-files --commit
check with snapshot verify
So, the issue boils down to actually finding the latest blobs written when running kopia snapshot. This can be done rather easily on any *nix type system like this:
This will spill out a list of all files that have been created after 2025/04/05 10:54 along with the date and size. Of course you would adjust that time to somewhat just before you ran your snapshot. From there you could go ahead and remove the blobs - which should be up to 20MB in size (unless you changed that for the repo). Please note as well, that I excluded the xn0 directory, as I think that this holds the indexes from the repo and we wouldn’t remove those.
After removing some - or even all of the listed blobs, you can run
-newermt '10 minutes ago' # other formats/ranges supported, see `date input formats`
Assuming GNU’s version, find [path to kopia repo] -type file -not -path "*/xn0/*" -newermt '10 minutes ago' -delete && kopia snapshot verify && kopia snapshot fix invalid-files --commit might well be the way to do it all in one shot.
Anyone stuck saddled with Windows should give MobaXterm serious consideration. That version of find should be up to date.