Hey Fellas!
I'm on Virtualmin 4.00.gpl and have local backups scheduled in Virtualmin and Webmin such as:
/backups/virtualmin
/backups/webmin
My server locked-up for some reason, and I found out that one of my virtual server's directory data usage skyrocketed and ate up all my disk space.
The virtual server (server1) at question has backup files from 100MB to 600MB per file, running with a retention of 5 days and 2 monthly's. So, 7 backup files total in /backups/virtualmin. Of course, all these files are tarballed and gunzipped.
I noticed that my virtual server's directory was growing uncontrollably in:
/home/server1/.backup/
The total usage size was 2.7GB, likely uncompressed. I can only assume that the scheduled backup processes creates these files prior to compression but does not clean these files up.
Is this the way it's supposed to be? Do you have any clue why there's all this excess data in /home/server1/.backup, instead of staying exclusively contained within /backups/virtualmin?
Thanks for your input!
Virtualmin indeed puts all the files that make up its backup into a directory ".backup", before it gzips them. Normally it cleans up those directories of course. Maybe those leftovers on your system are a result of that crash you described?
First thing you might try is simply deleting the ".backup" directories and see if they show up again. Large amount of data can also happen due to MySQL database contents too, which are created there as an SQL dump when being backed up.