Can I remove tarball backups in snapshot?

[timmeh]

Hi all,

I was looking into storage usage of my Cloudron instance and I stumbled across some unusually high storage usage of my backups.. To clarify, my Cloudron server runs:

• a NextCloud instance with about 16GB worth of files (Cloudron says it's 40GB, but I guess there's some footprint for the installation and file versioning etc.)
• a Wordpress instance of a few MBs (Cloudron says 60MB)

Now, as far as I understand backups in rsync start with a snapshot and work incrementally from there. I do not upload/remove too many files from my server so the storage remains fairly constant. Therefore, I'd expect a backup size somewhere not too far above the 40GB.

I checked my backups and they were covering a quite whopping 66GB. Taking a closer look revealed some tar.gz files and my hunch is that they are remnants of my old backup setup into tarballs. My snapshot folder is filled as such:

• /app_<NextCloud-app-ID> (40GB)
• app_<NextCloud-app-ID>.tar.gz (20GB)
• /app_<WordPress-app-ID> (30MB)
• /box
• /box.tar.gz
• app_<unknown-app-ID>.tar.gz (I think this might be an old app I had)

So the tarballs are together over 20GB in size, confirming my hunch (because it would make my backups 46GB in size).

TLDR; Are tarballs saved in the backup/snapshot folder when backups are in rsync? Or can I remove tarballs in my backup/snapshot folder?

[girish]

@timmeh Your assessment is correct. If you switched the backups to rsync mode, you can remove the .tar.gz files. They are left overs from your previous backup. Maybe we can add an option to remove the old backup files (of previous configs). But of course, that will require cloudron to remember previous config as well.

Also, to be 100% clear, only remove the .tar.gz files. Do not remove any other files in the snapshot directory. The snapshot directory is the "working directory" of the backup system and stores the previous state.