CrashPlan Linux: Deleting the Massive Cache

7/14/2012 by gadicc in Tech, Coding, Sysadmin

Recently I noticed that I had surprisingly little free space on my root partition. Some investigation revealed a 6.8GB “/usr/local/crashplan/cache/42” directory.

The fix was pretty easy to find for MacOS, and for convenience I’m reposting the instructions suited for Linux. Firstly, to quote the page:

CrashPlan does not have the ability to limit the size of the Cache file though you can modify the New Version (every x [time]) setting to help prevent the Cache file from growing to quickly. You can find this setting by opening CrashPlan and viewing Settings > Backup (Sets) > Frequency and versions > New version.

To clear the cache, do the following:

1. Launch CrashPlanDesktop (from terminal, or, Alt-F2 CrashPlanDesktop)
2. Double-click the CrashPlan logo in the upper right corner.
3. In the text input area at the very bottom of the CrashPlan desktop, type: backup.replace 42
4. Press Enter. In the text input area at the very bottom of the CrashPlan desktop, type: restart
5. Press Enter.

That’s it. These instructions are close to identical to those in the original post from MacIT Solutions, but I had no need to manually delete the cache directory after the steps above.

The result (after a resync) was a cache directory that was 0.6GB instead of 6.8GB (in my case).

Ref: http://support.crashplan.com/doku.php/recipe/stop_and_start_engine