Removing Backups of non-existent VMs

[dpearceFL]

I have old backups for VMs that I have since deleted. Can I just safely delete the folders under /mnt/datastore_name/VMID ? A lot of backups so command line is what I am trying to do.

 

[Hannes Laimer]

Hey,

yes, but your path is missing a /vm/ between the datastore path and the VMID, assuming you don't have namespaces setup.

Note: you can delete whole VMs through the UI, so all the backups of a VM.

 

[dpearceFL]

Yes, you are correct. The path should have been "/mnt/datastore/datastore_name/vm"

Since the content of these folders are quite small and the data is dedupped, what process cleans up blocks no longer used?

 

[Hannes Laimer]

That is the Garbage Collection, it basically removes chunks after a day that are not referenced by any index files. And what you are deleting are index files, so if chunks were only referenced by index files you deleted, they will be removed by GC after ~1 day.