Re: [Duplicity-talk] Running out of disk space -- new full backup?

[Scott Hannahs]

> On Feb 13, 2016, at 12:50 PM, Grant <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
>>>>> If you do full backups regularly, and keep at least 2 around, you can 
>>>>> always
>>>>> opt to keep fewer full backups too. See remove-all-but-n-full and
>>>>> remove-all-inc-of-but-n-full for some options.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> So far I've only done 1 full backup and all incrementals after that.
>>>> Should I re-think this strategy?  Is the point of running periodic
>>>> full backups to save disk space as per above?
>>>> 
>>>> - Grant
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>>>> One of the systems I send my backups to is running out of space.  Is
>>>>>> the solution to delete all of the backups and run a new full backup?
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Can anyone help me figure this out?  I've been using duplicity-0.6.26
>>> happily for quite a while but I'm finally up against disk space.  One
>>> of my systems has 14GB in /root/.cache/duplicity/ compared to 38GB in
>>> the backup target.  That seems crazy so I deleted the cache but the
>>> next duplicity run brought it right back in full 14GB glory.
>>> 
>>> Will running another full backup and using remove-all-but-n-full and
>>> remove-all-inc-of-but-n-full reduce disk space usage at the backup
>>> target and in the cache?
>>> 
>>> Is there another way to reduce the disk space used as cache?
>>> 
>>> - Grant
>> Well a couple of things.  If you have a very very long backup chain of 
>> incrementals it will increase the cache size a lot.  It is also less 
>> reliable since if one of the incrementals is corrupted then all of the 
>> subsequent incrementals will not be available.  That is why an infinite 
>> chain of incrementals is not a good idea.
>> 
>> Periodic full backups are the answer and that is why I have a script that 
>> decides to make an incremental or not every 30 +/- a few days on several 
>> directories.  The random +/- keeps the network from being in sync and 
>> requiring a full backup of all directories on the same day.
> 
> 
> Thanks Scott.  How best to transition from a single full backup and
> infinite incrementals to running a full backup every 30 days?
> 
> Should I just use full-if-older-than, remove-all-but-n-full, and
> remove-all-inc-of-but-n-full from now on?  Any other cleanup necessary
> (cache or otherwise)?

My shortened commands are:

nice -n19 /sw/bin/duplicity --full-if-older-than 40D --num-retries 5 --tempdir 
/var/tmp/duplicity --volsize 250 --asynchronous-upload
nice -n19 /sw/bin/duplicity remove-all-but-n-full 1 --num-retries 5 --tempdir 
/var/tmp/duplicity --volsize 250 --asynchronous-upload
nice -n19 /sw/bin/duplicity cleanup --force --num-retries 5 --tempdir 
/var/tmp/duplicity --volsize 250 --asynchronous-upload

This means that the full has to complete before removing the older one.

-Scott