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

[Scott Hannahs]

> On Feb 11, 2016, at 20:27, 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.

-Scott