[raymw]

My back up files have grown huge and I notice clearly it is the massive number of thumbnails that have built up on my system. Looking at them on the PC I notice most are just superfluous thumbnails and of course there are many essential ones. As there are so many hundreds or even over a thousand of them it would take ages to go through on the PC and delete them and load back in an edited list of thumbnails still needed via FTP (yes I use FTP into my box now occasionally). So is there a safe way to delete them even if all and let new needed thumbnails load back in form online

I tried simply by restoring all built the thumbnails with robwellers Backup add-on I use but although it still booted it ended up with just a blank black screen and needed to Revert to Android and then re-flash MX Linus Helix 14.2 back to recover the box. SO obviously I cannot just blanket delete all the thumbnails as they have coded links to them it appears

Of course I could just start a fresh set up adding the needed sources like .Xunity and Fusion and Super Repo etc and installing afresh all the add-ons I like to have in my basic set up and saving that as a fresh backup to load onto newly converted MX Linux boxes. But wondered if I need to go down that quite convoluted hour or so worth of work.

Ray all you need to do is delete the thumbnails folder and also the textures13 file in the database folder. In fact you can delete the whole database folder. Then do a backup.
On restore the thumbnails will be re generated.

Thanks a lot Ed. That did the trick and no I did not delete the full Database folder either just the Textures13 file and that was why it did not work just deleting the Thumbnails folder. With the Thumbnails folder deleted and this Textures13 file I simply rebooted and all was fine and the needed thumbnails just simply downloaded as required. One little problem was for some reason only three items in the Phoenix home screen came up and not just missing thumbnails but only three of normal 8 or so options. I simply uninstalled Pheonix and reinstalled it and all was good again and could find no other problems. Now a much smaller backup results and more free memory available. It did not happened when I similarly cleared another box of all those built up thumbnail files.

Thanks also Bobones for your input mate but I did not in the end need to go down that more complex path.