Deleting (3 year old) backups from /var/backups/ (Old Backups) is safe?

[ei8fdb]

I've searched the forum but haven't yet found an answer.

It's funny, the only recurring work I have with my Cloudron instance relates to backups, and that's only because of diskspace. Cloudron has given me hours a month back and paid for itself many times over!

So to my issue....

I've a Cloudron instance (CLOUDRON) doing backups to a directory on another server (BACKUP), via SSHFS. It works very well usually.

Checking earlier, I've had successful backups for at least a month.

I've been looking through CLOUDRON disk usage and found old backups (~70GB). See below:

total 2580
drwxrwxrwx  8 root       root         4096 Jul 17 06:25 .
drwxr-xr-x 13 root       root         4096 May  7  2019 ..
drwxr-xr-x  2 yellowtent yellowtent   4096 Dec 24  2021 2021-12-24-230000-685
drwxr-xr-x  2 yellowtent yellowtent   4096 Dec 25  2021 2021-12-25-010000-633
drwxr-xr-x  2 yellowtent yellowtent   4096 Jan  1  2022 2022-01-01-191853-674
drwxr-xr-x  2 yellowtent yellowtent   4096 Jan  1  2022 2022-01-01-200000-628
drwxr-xr-x  2 yellowtent yellowtent   4096 Jan  2  2022 2022-01-02-200000-686

Since my CLOUDRON VPS diskspace is limited, and I have successful backups (with snapshots) on my BACKUP server, I'd like to remove these backups listed above.

Can I safely delete these 2-3 year old backups from /var/backups, and the associated snapshots? If not, is SCPing them (and the snapshots) over to the BACKUP server a safe alternative?

Thanks.

[nebulon]

Yes you can safely delete those. Those are probably from before you reconfigure the backup storage as Cloudron does not purge backups from old backup configs automatically.

[ei8fdb]

Great, thanks @nebulon. I was pretty sure the answer was yes, but I wanted to confirm.

Edit: since I can delete them backup dirs, I assume I can also delete the associated snapshot:

me@CLOUDRON:/var/backups# ls -la snapshot/
total 15263272
drwxr-xr-x 2 yellowtent yellowtent        4096 Jan  2  2022 .
drwxrwxrwx 8 root       root              4096 Jul 17 06:25 ..
-rw-r--r-- 2 yellowtent yellowtent 15629218346 Jan  2  2022 app_3fe158b6-7c19-4d38-880c-5811175b868f.tar.gz

[nebulon]

yes, the snapshot folder is the folder where the backup is initially made and then from there it is rotated. In your case it was also part of the previous config.