Forum Support/Tips & Tricks
Reset your account for more space
Kevin Woods
posted this on August 30, 2010 16:14
While you can delete folders and files from the web console, ccasionally we have customers who want to remove everything and start fresh to reduce the amount of space being used and generally clean things up. You can reset your backup and start fresh so that your online storage only contains what is currently on your local computer.
Resetting your backup will remove all historical versions and any duplicate files will be removed freeing up storage space. It will also only put back into your account files as they exist on your local computer. Here are the steps:
- Login to the web console by clicking the Browse button in the software to login automatically.
- Delete the computers using the blue drop down arrow and give it a couple minutes to complete.
- Open the SafeCopy software and select Restart Backup. (Windows: under the Settings menu which looks like a gear; Mac: under the SafeCopy menu at the top of the screen.)
Comments
Quoting SafeCopy: "The “delete” action will move your files to the trash, out of view in your account, pending a permanent delete in two weeks. Then when you Restart Backup it will run through the folders and files selected for backup on your computer and move any files that match back into your account without having to re-upload. This makes the process go quickly."
How quickly? It looks to me as if it's crawling -- I'm at 0.2%. Seems that all it should have to do is match the names of files and restore the most recent, right? I've got 251,000 files on my main computer that have been backed up to SafeCopy.
Couldn't there just be a simple button in SafeCopy that says "Delete all except most recent version of files"?
Yes, great suggestion. That type of feature is planned in the future along with the ability to keep your SafeCopy account more in sync with your computer files as you delete things from your local computer. This would be an option to enable or disable, but it is not yet available.
Thanks, Kevin, for your response. Of course I don't know what the "roadmap" is for your software development, but I just had another thought on this. Seems it would be nice to be able to tell Safe Copy to just keep the two most recent versions of each file or have a date criteria, i.e. "keep all the revisions of the files dated after ________". However, in my practical experience with this, I have several files that I update almost daily and that really don't need to be revisioned. But if I don't reset my account, they zap the storage space. Maybe you've got some more elegant solution planned: like a panel that comes up with a list of files that are over ____ MB in size and have over ____ revisions, and then a button to delete all revisions and keep only the most recent.? My "complaint" is that one has to navigate quite a lot on the web interface to dig down to find the culprit files though in fact there probably aren't very many of them that are bloating the backup. Then the deleting process is tedious (one at a time). Just my 2 cents from a real-life situation. Have a great day!