I’m using Kup as my main backup tool, and despite some minor things that can be improved, I find it to be an excellent tool, and the integration with the KDE desktop is one of the main selling points for me.
I’m in need to clean my backup archive and remove some files/folders that ended here despite not being necessarily needed to be backed-up (my ignore list is evolving, so this may happen sometimes)
Is there a way to selectively remove some files/folders from a backup archive, complete with all their recorded snapshots?
As an example, as shown in “File Digger”, I want to remove the .eclipse folder from all snapshots.
Sorry, but bup (and kup…)does not support a way to do this easily. Since bup backups are saved as a git repository, I think it is possible by using git commands that rewrite commit history. First thing that comes to my mind is git rebase --interactive. The app called lazygit can make that easier! Still a bunch of work to hunt down all commits that touch what you want to remove. Clever internet people (or AI chatbot) can probably come up with a script that does what you want in one go. Once all references to a file has been removed you can run bup gc to actually reclaim storage space. Good luck!
Follow up… I asked a chatbot and was told that a python app called git-filter-repo can do what you want. Call it with --invert-paths to specify which files to remove instead of which files to keep. Again, use bup gc when done removing stuff.
