Re: [BackupPC-users] Disk space used far higher than reported pool size

"Craig O'Brien" <cobrien AT fishman DOT com> wrote on 10/29/2013 08:21:11 PM: > I'm not sure how I can go about determining if a particular backup > is using the pool or just storing the files in the PC folder. What's > the best way to check if a given backup set is represented in the > pool or not? Would knowing the size of all the pc folders help narrow it down?

Nope.

> I'm not sure if this is the best way to check the hard linking, but > here's a test I thought might be helpful. I did this command to see > if a common file in these backups are pointing to the same inodes.

You want to look for files in the pc directory that have only one hardlink. These files are not in the pool and need to either be deleted or connected to files in the pool.

Jeff Kosowsky gave you a command to list files with only one hardlink. Adam Goryachev gave you a good du command to find out how much space is being taken by the pc directory *after* counting the files in the pool separately. That command will take a long time to run, but it will give you a pretty clear idea of where the space is being consumed.

I would not stake my life on this, but I would bet a pretty substantial amount of money: you did something to break the pooling. Most likely by copying backups around. This undid the hardlinks and left you with individual copies of the files.

Or punt completely: rebuild the BackupPC server and start over.

You could do almost as well by confirming that your latest backups *are* hardlinking properly and then deleting all of the old backups except maybe a copy or two. I would not delete the copies by hand, but rather change the configuration to only keep 1 full and 1 incremental. It might be a good idea to make some archives to make sure you have a good copy somewhere. In any case, once BackupPC has deleted all of the old backups, go into your pc directories and make sure that there is indeed only the backups listed in the GUI in the folder structure. Then, change the incremental and full keep counts back to what they should be and allow it to rebuild.

The only other thing that I can think of is that you did something wrong with archiving and accidentally archived data somewhere within the BackupPC tree. In my case, I archive to a removable hard drive and sometimes the drive is not mounted when the archive runs. The archives are then put on the backup drive (because that's where the removable drive is mounted). That's tricky because you can't see the files when the drive *is* mounted (which is the vast majority of the time). I have to unmount the drive and then I can see terabytes of archive data that should have been written to a removable drive.

I don't know if that might be part of your problem. But it's the only other thing I can think of.

Tim Massey


Out of the Box Solutions, Inc. Creative IT Solutions Made Simple! http://www.OutOfTheBoxSolutions.com tmassey AT obscorp DOT com		22108 Harper Ave. St. Clair Shores, MI 48080 Office: (800)750-4OBS (4627) Cell: (586)945-8796

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