Why is my backup drive full?

[nebulon]

Just to get a clear picture here, can you double check your backup configuration to see the folder it actually is using for backups? Also check if you use tarball or rsync style backup.

Note that if you change the backup configuration, the old backups will remain on the disk, Cloudron does not do any purging of old backups. For example if you switch from tarball to rsync, the old tarballs will still exist on disk and have to be manually removed as of now.

[girish]

Also, make sure that the "Directory is external disk" option is checked. This will make sure that the external disk is actually mounted.

[jdaviescoates]

@nebulon said in Why is my backup drive full?:

Just to get a clear picture here, can you double check your backup configuration to see the folder it actually is using for backups?

Doh!

Yeah, I've got a volume mounted so it's not /var/backups/ it's at /mnt/backups

Here they all are!

root@ubuntu-2gb-fsn1-1:~# ls -l /mnt/backups
total 164
drwxr-xr-x 2 yellowtent yellowtent  4096 Sep  6 22:30 2020-09-06-223002-163
drwxr-xr-x 2 yellowtent yellowtent  4096 Sep  8 22:30 2020-09-08-223001-828
drwxr-xr-x 2 yellowtent yellowtent  4096 Sep  8 22:30 2020-09-08-223002-037
drwxr-xr-x 2 yellowtent yellowtent  4096 Sep  9 22:30 2020-09-09-223002-877
drwxr-xr-x 2 yellowtent yellowtent  4096 Sep  9 22:38 2020-09-09-223003-092
drwxr-xr-x 2 yellowtent yellowtent  4096 Sep  9 22:30 2020-09-09-223003-461
drwxr-xr-x 2 yellowtent yellowtent  4096 Sep  9 22:30 2020-09-09-223048-638
drwxr-xr-x 2 yellowtent yellowtent  4096 Sep 11 22:30 2020-09-11-223001-919
drwxr-xr-x 2 yellowtent yellowtent  4096 Sep 11 22:30 2020-09-11-223002-397
drwxr-xr-x 2 yellowtent yellowtent  4096 Sep 12 22:40 2020-09-12-224039-652
drwxr-xr-x 2 yellowtent yellowtent  4096 Sep 13 22:41 2020-09-13-224129-874
drwxr-xr-x 2 yellowtent yellowtent  4096 Sep 13 22:45 2020-09-13-224527-403
drwxr-xr-x 2 yellowtent yellowtent  4096 Sep 13 22:47 2020-09-13-224555-257
drwxr-xr-x 2 yellowtent yellowtent  4096 Sep 13 22:47 2020-09-13-224713-002
drwxr-xr-x 2 yellowtent yellowtent  4096 Sep 13 22:48 2020-09-13-224757-613
drwxr-xr-x 2 yellowtent yellowtent  4096 Sep 14 02:30 2020-09-14-023003-201
drwxr-xr-x 2 yellowtent yellowtent  4096 Sep 14 02:31 2020-09-14-023003-213
drwxr-xr-x 2 yellowtent yellowtent  4096 Sep 14 02:30 2020-09-14-023003-224
drwxr-xr-x 2 yellowtent yellowtent  4096 Sep 14 02:31 2020-09-14-023050-510
drwxr-xr-x 2 yellowtent yellowtent  4096 Sep 15 22:40 2020-09-15-224017-990
drwxr-xr-x 2 yellowtent yellowtent  4096 Sep 18 22:40 2020-09-18-224017-550
drwxr-xr-x 2 yellowtent yellowtent  4096 Sep 19 00:57 2020-09-19-003001-934
drwxr-xr-x 2 yellowtent yellowtent  4096 Sep 20 00:39 2020-09-20-000010-527
drwxr-xr-x 2 yellowtent yellowtent  4096 Sep 20 22:30 2020-09-20-223002-164
drwxr-xr-x 2 yellowtent yellowtent  4096 Sep 21 00:56 2020-09-21-003001-880
drwxr-xr-x 2 yellowtent yellowtent  4096 Sep 21 22:30 2020-09-21-223003-597
drwxr-xr-x 2 yellowtent yellowtent  4096 Sep 21 22:30 2020-09-21-223003-806
drwxr-xr-x 2 yellowtent yellowtent  4096 Sep 21 22:30 2020-09-21-223003-870
drwxr-xr-x 2 yellowtent yellowtent  4096 Sep 23 22:30 2020-09-23-223001-540
drwxr-xr-x 2 yellowtent yellowtent  4096 Sep 24 00:30 2020-09-24-003001-489
drwxr-xr-x 2 yellowtent yellowtent  4096 Sep 24 22:11 2020-09-24-220003-529
drwxr-xr-x 2 yellowtent yellowtent  4096 Sep 25 13:37 2020-09-25-132557-773
drwxr-xr-x 2 yellowtent yellowtent  4096 Sep 25 22:30 2020-09-25-223001-288
drwxr-xr-x 2 yellowtent yellowtent  4096 Sep 25 22:30 2020-09-25-223001-426
drwxr-xr-x 2 yellowtent yellowtent  4096 Sep 26 02:30 2020-09-26-023001-266
drwxr-xr-x 2 yellowtent yellowtent  4096 Sep 26 08:36 2020-09-26-082946-798
drwx------ 2 root       root       16384 Jan 15  2020 lost+found
drwxr-xr-x 2 yellowtent yellowtent  4096 Sep 26 08:29 snapshot
root@ubuntu-2gb-fsn1-1:~# 

@nebulon said in Why is my backup drive full?:

Note that if you change the backup configuration, the old backups will remain on the disk, Cloudron does not do any purging of old backups. For example if you switch from tarball to rsync, the old tarballs will still exist on disk and have to be manually removed as of now.

That explains why the ancient ones (because I purchased and mounted a volume) were still in /var/backups

[girish]

@jdaviescoates said in Why is my backup drive full?:

/var/backups/

You can safely remove the files/backups here, will get back some space.

[jdaviescoates]

@girish said in Why is my backup drive full?:

You can safely remove the files/backups here, will get back some space.

Just to be clear, I'm assuming I can safely remove absolutely everything in there, right?

Perhaps even completely remove that folder?

[girish]

@jdaviescoates said in Why is my backup drive full?:

Perhaps even completely remove that folder?

Yes, you can remove it entirely.

[jdaviescoates]

@girish OK will do.

The error messages I'm getting are still really strange. Latest one is the strangest yet:

Not enough disk space for backup. Needed: 1.08 GB Available: 1.08 GB

Either way, guess I need to delete a few more old backups from /mnt/backups before backing up will work again...

[jdaviescoates]

In the end I just bit the bullet and doubled the size of my backup disk!

Still slightly confused/ bemused by all the strange random space errors I was getting though!

[ei8fdb]

@girish I had the same question as @jdaviescoates. I've moved my backups from internal same drive to an external USB drive.

I am using tarballs as backup format.

I've moved the backup directories from /var/backups/ to my external drive. If I want to restore from those backup directories, do I need the contents of the /var/backups/snapshot directory also?

If I don't want to restore from those older backups, can I confirm that it's OK to delete the contents of the /var/backups/snapshot directory?

Thanks for the helpful thread.

[avatar1024]

@jdaviescoates If you're using rsync, the space errors might not be so strange, as it would only need to add additional files, rather than backing up the whole thing again, hence the space required for a given backup might be quite random (depending what has changed since the last one). Just a suggestion though. And of course if you're using tarball then that is really weird!

[jdaviescoates]

@avatar1024 yeah, it was tarball.

[girish]

@ei8fdb said in Why is my backup drive full?:

I've moved the backup directories from /var/backups/ to my external drive. If I want to restore from those backup directories, do I need the contents of the /var/backups/snapshot directory also?

The snapshot directory is not required for restoring. BUT it's required for the actual the backups to work (so think of it as a working directory for backups). It's important to not remove that directory when doing backups! Since, Cloudron will use hard links from the actual backups to the snapshot directory, it's not really taking up extra space.