Sometimes, there may arise a situation where you need to delete files manually from the secondary storage drive. Often, this may be recommended by NewTek Support in cases where something is taking up an unexpected amount of space, or is corrupt in some way. In addition, if you've performed a factory reset, you may wish to wipe the files on the secondary storage drive as well, for a fresh start. You will need to connect a monitor, keyboard, and mouse to the unit to perform these steps. If you are familiar with the usage of the Linux terminal, you could also SSH into the box and perform these tasks remotely, but that is beyond the scope of this guide.
First, open the files app. You can do this by clicking the appropriate icon on the side bar of the Operating System.
The secondary storage drive isn't saved as a favorite location by default, so to find it, first we must click "Other Locations" in the left sidebar.
Then, double click "Computer"
Then, in order, navigate to mnt, and then to storage.
You should now see two directories, capturecast and daemon. You may want to switch to the list view, as you can see here in the tile view, we're already encountering directory names that have to be split between multiple lines. You can do this by clicking the view button in the upper right.
The capturecast directory contains finalized captures that have been processed by CaptureCast, while the daemon directory contains data from the daemon (CaptureCast's media processing element) before it is processed by CaptureCast, as well as logging for the daemon explicitly. We'll be focusing on the capturecast directory, but many of the same things apply to the daemon directory.
NOTE: Do NOT delete the parent directories of daemon and capturecast - only delete their contents.
Before going any further, let's quickly go over the structure of the linux filesystem. The root of the filesystem lives at /. Each further level of subdirectory adds the name of that subdirectory, and then another / at the end. For example, if I was looking for the desktop files, which live inside the capturecast_customer user's home directory, I would go to /home/capturecast_customer/Desktop. The easiest analogue in Windows would be the very root level of the C:/ drive. However, unlike Windows, every subsequent drive also lives under this single root, generally in the /mnt directory. Our secondary storage drive lives at /mnt/storage, and everything under that directory is on the 2TB secondary media storage disk, and not the NVME drive that serves as our primary boot drive. So, in this case, when you see the daemon and capturecast directories, those both live on the spinning hard disk drive.
Now, if you've come here to wipe out everything on the drive as part of a factory reset, right click in the empty space in the pane containing the directories, and select Open in Terminal.
Inside the terminal, type the following commands, hitting enter after each:
- sudo rm -rf daemon/*
- sudo rm -rf capturecast/*
The system will then ask for your capturecast_customer user password, which you will need to enter.
What are we actually doing here? The * serves as a wildcard symbol, so we're telling the system, we're already in /mnt/storage, so go ahead and remove everything that lives inside the capturecast and daemon directories, without deleting them. The reason we have to use sudo is because that gives us root privileges, which we need because the capturecast_customer user doesn't own any of these files - instead, these files are owned by the user that is dedicated to running capturecast, the aptly named capturecast user. This is standard operating procedure for Linux systems, and ensures the security of processes, since they're isolated from other processes and not accessible by the end user, but as always, security can cause annoyances, and we need privileges to delete another user's files, which sudo gives us.
Inside capturecast, there will be directories associated with years. In most cases you'll only see one of these, but if you're right at the transition between two years, you may see two. Underneath those, you will see directories that indiate month, and then finally day. For example, the full directory structure for a specific day would be something like - /mnt/storage/capturecast/2022/10/19/. Within this directory structure, we can, at any point, go ahead and right click to open a terminal just like we described above, and use a rm -rf command. For example, if I'm inside 2022/10, and I want to delete the 19th, all I have to do is open the terminal, then use the command: sudo rm -rf 19. Unlike above, we don't need our wildcard symbol, *, because we're okay with deleting everything in the directory recursively. In addition, if, for some reason, we just need to delete a single file, we can use the command sudo rm filename - we don't need the -rf parameters because we're just deleting a file instead of a directory.
With these guidelines, you should be able to delete anything you want to delete from the secondary drive, from single directories and files, all the way to clearing out the entire drive after a reset.
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