DOKK / manpages / debian 12 / borgbackup2 / borg2-delete.1.en
BORG-DELETE(1) borg backup tool BORG-DELETE(1)

borg-delete - Delete archives

borg [common options] delete [options]

This command deletes archives from the repository.

Important: When deleting archives, repository disk space is not freed until you run borg compact.

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 a matching pattern, using the --match-archives PATTERN option (for more info on these patterns, see borg_patterns).

Always first use --dry-run --list to see what would be deleted.

See borg-common(1) for common options of Borg commands.

do not change repository
output verbose list of archives
consider checkpoint archives for deletion (default: not considered).
print statistics for the deleted archive
delete only the local cache for the given repository
force deletion of corrupted archives, use --force --force in case --force does not work.
write checkpoint every SECONDS seconds (Default: 1800)

only consider archive names matching the pattern. see "borg help match-archives".
Comma-separated list of sorting keys; valid keys are: timestamp, name, id; default is: timestamp
consider first N archives after other filters were applied
consider last N archives after other filters were applied
consider archives between the oldest archive's timestamp and (oldest + TIMESPAN), e.g. 7d or 12m.
consider archives between the newest archive's timestamp and (newest - TIMESPAN), e.g. 7d or 12m.
consider archives older than (now - TIMESPAN), e.g. 7d oder 12m.
consider archives newer than (now - TIMESPAN), e.g. 7d or 12m.

# delete a single backup archive:
$ borg delete Monday
# actually free disk space:
$ borg compact
# delete all archives whose names begin with the machine's hostname followed by "-"
$ borg delete -a '{hostname}-*'
# delete all archives whose names contain "-2012-"
$ borg delete -a '*-2012-*'
# see what would be deleted if delete was run without --dry-run
$ borg delete --list --dry-run -a '*-May-*'


borg-common(1), borg-compact(1), borg-rdelete(1)

The Borg Collective

2023-03-01