Mass deleting from Google Cloud StorageEdit

Created , updated

I wanted to delete a huge Arq backup set, but that was taking forever in the Arq UI with no real feedback, so I tried to do the same from Google’s web UI and that just timed out interminably as well. The solution is to use the CLI tool.

  1. Download the official Cloud Tools.
  2. Unpack, then authorize: ./bin/gcloud init
  3. List the bucket you want to delete with gsutil ls (eg. ./bin/gsutil ls gs://arq-arq-backup-data-1023).
  4. Delete it with gsutil -m rm -r (eg. ./bin/gsutil -m rm -r gs://arq-arq-backup-data-1023).

Note the use of the -m flag, which makes the rm operation run in parallel, and about an order of magnitude faster.