My normal office practice is to do a full system backup on Fridays before leaving the office. I begin the backup sometimes, quite literally, as I’m walking out the door. Most of my apps I use in my practice have regularly scheduled backups during the week so I only do a full system backup weekly. I let the backup run after work on Fridays and walk back in on Mondays without skipping a beat.
Usually.
My current setup has my main Ubuntu file system on a 75 GB drive with 3 additional 250 GB drives for data storage. Two of the 250 GB drives are in a RAID. I’ve been lazy and have been doing my full system backup to my root directory and then I move the file wherever I want later on.
At least that’s the plan. I haven’t moved the backups out of the root directory for two weeks. Not having looked at the files, I didn’t notice that we’re becoming exponentially larger from week to week.
This last week’s backup was more than 28 GB. That was enough to fill the 75 GB disk that contains the Ubuntu root file system.
Because the disk was full, I could not login this morning like usual. Using ctrl-alt-F1 at the normal login screen with get you a terminal login in Ubuntu if you are unable to access your login from the Gnome GUI.
From terminal, I noticed the last 3 backups were increasing in size and were obviously the reason for the full disk. Using rm to delete the offensively large backup freed up enough disk space to allow me to login normally with the GUI.
Why the extra large backup file? I’m careful to exclude things like user trash and old backup files when I backup so I knew this couldn’t be it.
After a little more digging, I realized an employee had more than 6,100 emails in their inbox. This was what was putting the backup file size over the edge.
I never considered setting disk quotas in a small office with 7 employees but now realize it’s just something that has to be done.
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