Can I manually roll back an InfluxDB 2 DB?

InfluxDB 2
1

I have an InfluxDB 2 instance that I’m testing some stuff on. It doesn’t have backups but it did take some time to create, so I’d prefer if I didn’t have to recreate it completely from scratch, and especially I do not want the bucket ID to change because I’m using it on a lot of different devices.

I just made a mistake, I inserted a field as a string that was supposed to be a float. I immediately stopped InfluxDB.

My question is, can I go into the file system, find the data that was last inserted and manually delete it, so that the field name becomes available for a float field again?

I can see some data of the erroneously added datapoints in data/<bucket id>/_series/06/0000, data/<bucket id>/autogen/1104/fields.idx and wal/<bucket id>/autogen/_00004.wal.

2

Hello @AndreKR,
Yes so there is delete functionality in InfluxDB v2 but it’s limited:

You can delete data for a range though yes.

lmk if that helps!

3

But does that remove the field from the schema? The way I remember it, even if you delete all corresponding data points, the field type is forever frozen. That’s why I normally always double and triple check my field types because every mistake is permanent (unless I delete the bucket).

4

Does the field need to be named exactly as the currently inserted string-typed one? Maybe you could pick a different name and create a new one that has the correct type?

5

There’s still time to make compromises later when the database is in use, since I’m just setting it up I’d rather do it right.

What I ended up doing is this:

# Export the bucket into a file, up to a timestamp right before my mistake
docker exec influxdb2 influxd inspect export-lp --bucket-id [old-bucket-id] --output-path - --engine-path /var/lib/influxdb2/engine --end '2024-07-23T01:07:00.000Z' --compress > /root/influxdb-fuckup/dump.lp.gz

# Import the data into a new bucket
docker exec influxdb2 influx config create -a -u http://localhost:8086 -t [redacted] -n local
pv /root/influxdb-fuckup/dump.lp.gz | docker exec -i influxdb2 influx write --org-id [redacted] --bucket-id [new-bucket-id] --compression gzip

# Move the data from the new bucket into the old bucket
docker stop influxdb2
rm -r /opt/influxdb2/data/engine/data/[old-bucket]
rm -r /opt/influxdb2/data/engine/wal/[old-bucket]
cp -rp /opt/influxdb2/data/engine/data/[new-bucket] /opt/influxdb2/data/engine/data/[old-bucket]
cp -rp /opt/influxdb2/data/engine/wal/[new-bucket] /opt/influxdb2/data/engine/wal/[old-bucket]
docker start influxdb2