ARTIFACTORY: How to remove a cold storage binding when the cold storage instance is no longer available

When using the JFrog Cold Artifact Storage functionality, you might want to delete a binding between a live JPD instance and its respective cold JPD instance.

However, in accordance with our documentation, you cannot delete a binding between a live instance and a cold instance if the cold instance is not available:

“Important Note on Revoking Bindings
You cannot remove the binding between the Live instance and the Cold instance in cases where the Cold instance is not available anymore.“

You would also get the following error in the UI when trying to delete such a binding:

The fact that you cannot delete this binding and it actually restricts you from creating a new binding (since each live instance should only be paired with a single cold instance).

How to resolve this issue?

Option 1:

If you still have access to the cold instance, and you can still start it over, then:

1. Start the cold instance
2. Remove the pairing via the UI

Option 2:

In case the cold instance is no longer available, then the binding removal should be done via the Artifactory configuration files:

1. In the server which hosts the live instance, navigate to $JFROG_HOME/artifactory/var/etc/artifactory
2. Edit the artifactory.config.latest.xml file
3. Delete all the lines beginning with “<jfrogColdStorageArchivingNamespace>” and ending with “</jfrogColdStorageMasterToken>” (including both of these lines and everything in between)
4. Rename “artifactory.config.latest.xml” to “artifactory.config.import.xml”
5. Restart Artifactory

And now the binding should be gone and you may rebind your live instance to a new cold instance.