Re: [BackupPC-users] Where has all my disk space gone?

[Les M. <le...@fu...>]

Joe Casadonte wrote:

> BackupPC: version 3.0.0beta3
> OS: FC5
> 
> Much to my horror last night I discovered that I ran out of disk space
> on my backup server back in October (thankfully I did not learn this
> the hard way). 

It should have stopped doing backups when you had used 95% of the space 
and sent you email as soon as some machine had gone a few days without 
backups unless you changed the defaults.  There was a bug in earlier 
versions where the email didn't get sent if backups were skipped because 
the space was low.  I'm not sure when this was fixed.

> I have 2 servers, 2 laptops and an external drive backing up through
> BackupPC.  Disk-wise I have 230+ GB usable in a RAID 5 array, with
> less than 1 GB being used by the OS and misc other files (the server
> is dedicated to backup). 

If the backuppc archive isn't on it's own partition, you might have some 
large logfiles (or spooled mail files) taking space.

> My understanding was that once file ABCD was stored, as long as it
> never changed it would never be stored again, even across machines, if
> the file was identical. 

That's correct - unless your cpool directory is on a different partition 
than the pc directory and all the attempts to link files are failing.

> So even thought backup #172 is a full backup,
> it's not storing a full backup's worth of files, only the files that
> have changed. 

Yes, but large files that change slightly can be a problem, like mail 
files in unix mbox format (all messages in one file), database files, or 
virtual machine images.  You'll get a complete separate copy if a single 
byte changes.

> So, on the assumption that my understanding is correct, how do I go
> about figuring out what's using up my disk space?  Many thanks for the
> help and this very fine program!

The 'new files' in your listing didn't look like they should be a 
problem.  I'd look for anything else that might be using space first 
("du -s *" in /var, for example).


-- 
   Les Mikesell
    le...@fu...