rootfs increases by 5 to 10% during USB backup

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?