Sherry Lake (Feb 27 2025 at 20:31): Sherry Lake (Feb 27 2025 at 20:31):How do I delete a LARGE dataset (over 11,000 files)?
It is still in draft and used this command:
curl -H "X-Dataverse-key: $API_TOKEN" -X DELETE "$SERVER_URL/api/datasets/$ID"
and got this timeout message:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<html><head>
<title>503 Service Unavailable</title>
</head><body>
<h1>Service Unavailable</h1>
<p>The server is temporarily unable to service your
request due to maintenance downtime or capacity
problems. Please try again later.</p>
</body></html>
Is there a way in the db to remove it? But then there are the 11,000+ files to remove?
Advice???
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Feb 27 2025 at 20:40):First, this sounds like a bug so please feel free to create an issue.
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Feb 27 2025 at 20:40):What if you delete some of the files first? Maybe that would help?
Sherry Lake (Feb 27 2025 at 21:04):I finally was able to see the dataset in the UI, it was timing out on me just to display.
Oh, I was off by a few 1,000..... the dataset now has 14,838 files.
It is very slow..... and still is timing out.... but I'll try to delete some files first.
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Feb 27 2025 at 21:08):Sounds good. Perhaps deleting files via API will be more reliable.
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Feb 28 2025 at 14:24):I see you posted to the google group as well. Good idea. :sweat_smile:
Sherry Lake (Feb 28 2025 at 14:38):Even using the API to delete a (one) file, stalls the system.
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Feb 28 2025 at 14:43):Whoa!
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Feb 28 2025 at 14:43):That's definitely a bug.
Philip Durbin 🚀 (Mar 27 2025 at 18:15):See also #troubleshooting > Limit number of files per dataset
Last updated: Oct 30 2025 at 06:21 UTC