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dsnpevl's avatar
dsnpevl
Virtuoso
Jan 02, 2015

rootfs increases by 5 to 10% during USB backup

Is it common behaviour that the rootfs size increases by 5 to 10% during a > 4 TB size backup to an external USB 3 drive? After the backup is finished, the size returns to the previous state, luckely.

But who can explain why there would be an increase in rootfs size during a backup in the first place?

4 Replies

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  • mdgm-ntgr's avatar
    mdgm-ntgr
    NETGEAR Employee Retired
    Temporary log files created during the backup.

    Not a problem. You should leave plenty of free space on the root partition at all times.
  • mdgm wrote:
    Temporary log files created during the backup.

    Thanks! That would explain it. Good to know this happens.

    mdgm wrote:
    You should leave plenty of free space on the root partition at all times.

    Yes, became painfully aware of that recently. 3rd party apps can slowly but surely eat away at the rootfs size. After a year of using database intensive apps, like koken and LogAnalyzer, some 20% of rootfs was taken by the MySQL data files and syslog. I have now moved those large files and dirs to a /apps/db/ dir and created symbolic links in /var/... to point to them, to work around the rootfs filling up.

    mdgm wrote:
    Not a problem.

    If you have plenty of free space in the root partition, it is not a problem, as you say. But if you are already in a state of using > 80% of rootfs and want to backup your data at that point, it would fill up your rootfs further. And that might cause even more issues, I presume. If you are > 80% in rootfs, the first order of business is then to reduce the size by offloading large files and dirs out of rootfs and create symbolic links to the new locations, right? Once you have enough space back in your rootfs (let's say 50% free?), you can focus on creating the backup?
  • StephenB's avatar
    StephenB
    Guru - Experienced User
    In that situation it'd be simpler and less risky to make your backups manually (or use tools on other systems, like robocopy on a PC). Then cleanup the root partition.

    Most add-ons are already storing their data in /data/.apps
  • StephenB wrote:
    In that situation it'd be simpler and less risky to make your backups manually (or use tools on other systems, like robocopy on a PC). Then cleanup the root partition.

    Yes, that's probably a better alternative. Have not worked with robocopy before. Should look into that. But I'm having issues with the speed of copying over the network, so probably need to fix that first.

    StephenB wrote:
    Most add-ons are already storing their data in /data/.apps

    Good! They should all do that :)

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