Skip to main content Skip to sidebar

Force Clean Storage in Proxmox Backup Server

•
backup proxmox

When backups consume 100% storage space in Proxmox Backup Server, the standard garbage collection process may fail to reclaim space even after deleting most content. Reboot doesn’t help in this situation.

The Problem

After filling up the backup storage and deleting most backup content, the garbage collection (GC) process was unable to release the expected amount of space. The storage remained nearly full despite having deleted the majority of backups.

The Solution

The issue can be resolved by manually updating the metadata timestamps for chunks, forcing them to be eligible for garbage collection.

Update chunk metadata timestamps:

find /mnt/datastore/store01/.chunks/ -type f -print -exec touch -a -c -d "2025-07-01 01:00" {} \;

Run garbage collection:

proxmox-backup-manager garbage-collect start store01

Results

  • Before: 32.124 TiB
  • After: 131.932 GiB