6.0.1 Backups eating all drive space

[quietas]

I updated to 6.0.1 from 5.18 last month, Sep 21 to be exact. At that time only 40% of the available drive space was used. Today I noticed that 80% was used. Through looking at the stats log, I can see each time weekly full backup is run, it eats about 15%. This is really different from what happened with version 5.

Will it keep doing this? I forsee running out of drive space really soon.

[quietas]

It looks like the /opt/zimbra/backup folder is sitting at 229gb, while /opt/zimbra/store is only 57gb. In 5.0.x we were using about 120gb total, now it's nearly 300gb.

Why?Are backups not compressed at all?

[dave_kempe]

I noticed the same thing, and have subsequently reduced the amount of backups I keep, and ship the backups off to another server every night. I think they are compressed, but something is taking all the diskspace somehow. Maybe a stuck thread is not releasing it.

[bdial]

backups can be compressed or uncompressed, it depends on hte -z argument to zmbackup in the crontab entries. it could be possible that you had this before, but the upgrade process removed it. i'd take a look

you can maybe get a better idea by looking at the size of the backups you have in /opt/zimbra/backup/sessions. an easy way to get a listing would be like

du -m -max-depth=1 /opt/zimbra/backup/sessions

[quietas]

Where would this hte setting be? I don't see it in /etc/crontab or in crontab.daily.

[bdial]

the best way to edit the cron files is using cron -e. make sure you're the zimbra user. it will spawn the default editor for this shell so if you have a favorite editor before you do naything else do

export VISUAL="nano -w"

replace nano -w (the -w specifies no word wrap) with whatever editor you prefer . Then do

crontab -e

you'll then be in the editor for the zimbra crontab entry. you want to find the backup lines that will look something like this

# BACKUP BEGIN
0 0 * * * /opt/zimbra/bin/zmbackup -del 1m
0 22 * * 5 /opt/zimbra/bin/zmbackup -f  -z -a all 
0 19 * * 0-4,6 /opt/zimbra/bin/zmbackup -i -z 
# BACKUP END

Yours might be slightly different times, but the important thing is that -z option which tells the backups to compress. When you've added it to your full and incremental backups, exit your editor with saving and you should see a message at the prompt saying that the new crontab was installed.

[dave_kempe]

Interesting. my backups were not compressed anymore - just turned on that option and I will see how we go.

[quietas]

I see that also. The -z option is not there for either of the last two lines in bdial's example.

I don't suppose anyone has put in an RFE for having this added to the Admin Console?

It seems that this should definitely be part of the config options. Turn off if it uses too much CPU time, too much drive space, or too much time to perform.