[SOLVED] Best way to delete contents of folder?

[DoubtingT]

Hi,

I have a Back In Time backup on an external hard drive, which was set to make an early morning snapshot of my home partition every day. Before proceeding with an install of Mageia 4, I decided to check that the backups are in order.

Unfortunately they aren't in order. The external drive is full to capacity because the incremental backups don't seem to have worked. I therefore have 76 huge files on it. The problem is that none of them show up in the Back In Time program, which now says, on startup, that the Snapshots folder can't be found. This means I can't delete them through the program. Also, access to these folders is restricted in Dolphin; if I shift-delete I get an error message saying that access is denied. The external hard drive has root permissions only.

Obviously I want to free the disk space so that I can backup again (this time with FWbackup) and then install Mageia 4, but I'm not confident about what command to use.

Anybody got a failsafe way of clearing out the Back In Time folders?

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer.

[doktor5000]

You can simply start dolphin as root via Alt+F2 and enter

Code: Select all

kdesu dolphin

Surely it can also be done via command, but that might be more error-prone. The command would be rm, for completeness sake.

[DoubtingT]

Hi doktor,

Somehow I had the impression that kdesu wasn't functional in Mageia. Anyway, I've never used it with Dolphin before, but of course it worked. Thanks for that.

I have one other problem. At one stage I must have tried to get rid of one (or possbily more) of these large files by shift-deleting (without root permissions) and taken my finger off the shift key before pressing delete. The upshot is that I'm now getting an error message telling me my Wastebin is full and I should remove objects manually before proceeding. Of course I've emptied the bin, but the message keeps coming back. If I reset the wastebin in Dolphin settings to have no limit on the amount of space that can be used, the message disappears, but I wonder if this is a good solution (I suppose the 10% limit is there for a reason).

Anyway, is the glitch likely to disappear when I update to Mageia 4? In this case I can just press on.

Thanks.

[doktor5000]

You can simply have a look what's stored inside the Trash folder: Go to ~/.local/share/Trash/files/ in dolphin, and delete all the files there - Trash empty.
You could also try to delete the file ~/.local/share/Trash/metadata if the former doesn't help.

FWIW, kdesu is not in your PATH, it's located at /usr/lib64/kde4/libexec/kdesu - it works only inside your KDE session and via Alt+F2 by default.

[DoubtingT]

Okay, the Trash folder also showed empty, but the metadata showed a huge cache number. I deleted it and restarted the computer. Everything working properly now.

Marking the query as solved.

Many thanks, as always.