My backup is blocked because there is not space left on the device I’m backing up to. This happened because the current retention policies are not aggressive enough.
I have already updated the retention policies, but since the storage device is full, I cannot delete some old snapshots and run the maintenance to really free some space (the maintenance process requires some free space for temporary files).
Which is the best way to free some space?
Is it possible to identify a given file or directory in the encrypted kopia files in the backup? So that I would directly delete them?
Another alternative would be to mount the backup on a local machine and delete some files from the mounted backup? Is this possible without ruining the rest of the backup?
Good luck with dealing with it. There is plenty of posts in this forum about this subject.
It is known “problem”:
but without proper solution yet. If it was me I would just start from the scratch as it seems that there is no clean way to recover such repo “inplace”. Which also means that you can always copy/move all kopia files somewhere else (with more free space) and do all required maintenance there.
Losing one repository should not be an issue if you follow some basic backup strategy.
In the future I recommend always to have some space holder file in your repo destination. I always put 1GB one just in case I run into issues like you now. It is simple and reliable way to have a safety valve:) For kopia and any other software.