Running UrBackup as the only resource-using application on a Raspberry Pi3 connected to a 4Tb external disk. Disk is partitioned as 10Gb for root filesystem, and the rest for UrBackup use in storing backups (it’s data directory).
UrBackup has filled up the root filesystem, specifically in directory /var/urbackup. Apparently, UrBackup’s usage of this directory is unbounded, unlike the data directory where routine maintenance is performed to keep its size in check.
Luckily Linux reserves file space specifically for the root user, so I can still get into the box to do some cleanup. But due to having the root filesystem full, UrBackup will not start.
So what is the recommended procedure for this disk space cleanup from the command line? And how do I configure UrBackup to not behave in this way going forward (by this I mean configure it to not use up all available space in /var)? I would much rather put bounds on UrBackup than increase the size of the root filesystem.
On one side that seems like a urbackup bad behavior to not account for this.
On the other side /var is expected to grow, so you should put either /var or /var urbackup in a different fs, so i think you should fix it that way.
If you dont want to move datas or change paths. You can look at mount bind option, it allows to mount an fs in 2 places.
To be totally fair, theses kind of files should usually go into /var/lib/, so that would be /var/lib/urbackup/ but it s not default settings. That’s where databases store their files, or kvm store images.
Yes, /var is expected to grow on a system, but not in an unconstrained manner from day to day operations. I would expect logfiles and such to grow there, but with a way to delete old unneeded logs. Putting an ever-growing database there, without mention of it (that I can recall) during installation is not the most system friendly behavior for an application. With all the mention of file space cleanup in the administration manual - for the data directory - I would have expected for any required databases to also go into that directory structure.
I can clean this up using standard Linux administrative commands. I know how to do this technically. But it would be nice if UrBackup would include cleanup tools of it’s own so administrators don’t have to go manually linking/moving/mounting/etc. to “fix” things. The only cleanup UrBackup commands I can find relate to the data directory, not this database, which is more an implied part of UrBackup than documented one. Possibly this database in its separate destination was mentioned during installation and I skipped over that reading during install. But I don’t recall this being the case. Maybe in a future release UrBackup can at least mention this, if not change behavior and move the database to the user data directory structure.
“Disk is partitioned as 10Gb for root filesystem, and the rest for UrBackup use in storing backups (it’s data directory).”
I couldn’t find any way to configure the location of UrBackup’s database directory, so I ended up creating a new directory in UrBackup’s data directory (on the large partition of that 4Tb drive), and then symlinked /var/urbackup (from the smaller root filesystem partition) to it. Works fine. A bit of a kludge, but good enough.
