Kamar backups gobbling disk space

[Patrick Dunford]

Since the Kamar people decided they were going to push out an automatic
Filemaker update to all and sundry they have placed a full copy of a
whole lot of different Kamar installer files inside the Live_Database
folder onto Filemaker servers. These files occupy 2.3 GB of space inside
this folder (on our server) . As this folder is part of a backup then
each backup is going to be referencing these files by default.

Kamar claim on their website that hard links are used to reference these
files when a backup is made so that the backup will not contain a full
copy of these files. However this is clearly not the case as it is
obvious on our backup disk that 2.3 GB of space is being used in each
and every backup (we are doing them hourly so it can be seen how they
will quickly gobble up the disk space).

The reason for this is pretty obvious: a hard link in NTFS cannot point
to a file on a different drive so if your backups are to a different
disk (common sense I would have thought) then the hard link thing is not
possible so that the disk ends up with every single backup containing
these files, in a 3.6 GB total backup size then 2.3 GB is a lot of
wasted space.

Only option then is to shut down the server and follow their
instructions to move the external storage folder to somewhere else out
of the Live_Database path and therefore able to be excluded from the
main backups.

[Julian Davison]

Aren't you doing incremental backups so the 2.3G is only included the first full backup, and then not subsequent ones? (Until the next full)

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[Kent]

Patrick,

Only the first backup will be a full copy of the files. All further backups will be a hard link to the first backup copy.

If you do a properties on each backup folder, it will look as if it's taking up the disk space - but if you do a properties on the whole drive - it won't add up.

Kent.

[Kent]

Julian,

The first backup of the file will always be a full copy (regardless if on the same disk or separate disk to the live files) - but subsequent backups (on the same drive) will be a hard-link to the first backup.

Kent.

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[Julian Davison]

Oh right, sorry, these are Kamar specific backups, rather than regular general purpose backups.

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[Patrick Dunford]

It's not very clear to me how the single instance storage works, but I have recovered gigabytes of actual disk space by deleting the apps folders wherever they appear on the backup drive. We have daily, hourly, weekly and incremental backups.

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[Simon - OBHS]

I moved that folder out a while back as i noticed every hourly, daily, weekly backup was backing up the folder and the storage was shrinking rather quickly.

Just created a folder outside the database directory called storage and moved the files there.

[Andrew Godfrey]

We use 4 different volumes/disks for SYSTEM, DATA, BACKUPS and FILES so that if either backups or scanned files get out of hand, the system won't crash and hopefully Kamar won't crash when it can no longer write new file attachments. (It doesn't crash when running out of backup storage space, just stops doing backups as we found out - are you watching your server free disk space regularly?)

BTW: Our Backup volume is using 62.2GB of space but explorer properties are showing 84.6GB of files and folders so that hard linking stuff is saving about a quarter drive space.

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Andrew Godfrey  |  Network Manager

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[Patrick Dunford]

Yes I would say your experience mirrors ours. I expect that is what we will be doing as well.

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