Question
Digitalocean snapshots over 100gb for no reason
- Posted on June 19, 2018
- DigitalOceanBackupsUbuntu 16.04
Asked by matt41f5576fd18eff1f5bf8ed
Creating a snapshot of my 11gb website, 160GB droplet and the snapshot size is over 100GB!
Ran GT5 and df -h and no filesystem or partitions are oversized, and the main filesystem still has 140 gb available…
Site is running wordpress and memory/cpu are all normal
Does anyone have any ideas as to why the snapshot size is over 100GB when i dont have 100GB of files on the droplet? Must be making a snapshot of non existant data or something?
This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.
You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!
These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.
Get our biweekly newsletter
Sign up for Infrastructure as a Newsletter.
Hollie's Hub for Good
Working on improving health and education, reducing inequality, and spurring economic growth? We'd like to help.
Become a contributor
Get paid to write technical tutorials and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.
Hello Matt,
Full disclosure I run a product called SnapShooter which takes backups of DigitalOcean servers.
I have noticed this issue with a couple of my customers over the last couple of months. They were getting bigger and bigger backups. We have contacted DigitalOcean to find out more information.
From Support Essentially, it’s not unheard of for a Snapshot’s size to vary and not reflect the used disk space amount on the Droplet. For instance, if you’re written a lot of data but later deleted it, that space isn’t automatically zeroed out in the disk.
Now one of my customers was getting the same issue with 10gb of diskspace working its way to 85gb. He got the same answer from support, but discovered on his own that a system reboot fixes the issues.
We are still working with DO to get an answer on this as it never used to happen. If I hear any more I will reply again.
Regards
Simon
Free space is actually unallocated space that has still old data inside. A snapshot makes a copy of whole filesystem… it happens outside your system so on hypervisor level. Snapshot are normally small because of compression. Solution: make the disk compressable by putting zero’s in unallocated space.
cat /dev/zero>>/zero
#disk will be full after some time
sync
rm /zero
sync
now you can make a snapshot. Snapshot will be small
Sounds like it might be a good idea for DigitalOcean to add the suggestion of rebooting the droplet before creating the snapshot, to their snapshot instructions.
Wayne Sallee Wayne@WayneSallee.com