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Backup of a ~160GB Domain takes up ~500GB of space

DReffects

Basic Pleskian
Hey Guys,

i really have a problem with plesk lately. I have a domain that's about 160GB in size (du -ch confirms this) but when i try to backup it, i'll end up with a hard disk with 0 bytes space left.

During the Backup tons of tar archives are being created in /var/lib/psa/dumps/domains/domain.com wich are ~367GB alone (wtf?) - THEN in /var/lib/psa/dumps a whole bunch of xml.tar files are being created which take another 60GB of space.

Then, finally my harddisk is full. What is happening here? Plesk is supposed to backup the data onto a remote FTP location, before the Backup my drive has ~450GB of free space. After i start the backup of a ~160GB Domain there's nothing left and the server basically denies all requests as he has no space left.

And the best part is: none of those archive files is being sent to the remote ftp. :(

I'd really appreciate help :)

Thanks!
-Daniel
 
The whole pleskbackup is a massive fail. I hate the POS..

First, it "backups" all the data to "somewhere" (don't even want to think about this s---), after that tar all that together and after THAT it tries to upload the tar file. So, if you want to backup 100 G of data you need at least 200 G free space! Probably a lot more because of the fancy XML format wasting tons of space under certain scenarios. Thinking about using pleskbackup to output to stdout and then redirecting that to somewhere remote, might work and cut the extra space needed to only ~100-150%. Not to mention that you need massive amount of cores and very high IOPS to cope with the load. This based on my experience on 9.0-9.2.3. Not tested on 9.3 since I am sure updating to 9.3 would break at least something and I really don't have time for angry clients.

Good luck.
 
thanks, you really speak from my heart.

so is there an alternative that can be automated in any way? (and that can restore an entire plesk domain)
 
I'll pitch in another idea I have been toying with.. If you don't have enough free space but have another server, mount a volume (over VPN?) with samba/CIFS or NFS to `grep DUMP /etc/psa/psa.conf` which was the first place pleskbackup dumps the data.

I am facing same kind of problems, it is completely ridiculous that to do full server backup free disk at least twice the size of the backup data is needed. BTW the 200%+ ("two intermediary backup dumps before FTP upload") just comes from my hazy memory, I think it worked this way. How I worked around it until I got completely frustrated (2 days or so): use archive splitting, and then move the first split file(s) to another volume with more free disk space and make a symlink(s) from the original place to the pieces on an another volume. Hardly convenient or automatic, could be automated with some clever scripting.
At the moment for full server backups I just do `pleskbackup server` to a directory and FTP manually so of course there will be two dumps, the aforementioned directory and the final result .tar. But I am pretty sure the 200%+ rule was there when using `pleskbackup` with FTP destination or the Plesk GUI FTP repo.

I wouldn't have replied to this thread unless I would've been right now trying to restore a small 7 GB site from PSA 9.2.3 to another server PSA 9.3 where the /tmp is 6 GB - moving files and creating symlinks is needed again as I know no way to configure the temporary directory. And oh yeah I am going all this trouble because PMM was unable to just migrate from the old server to the new server - empty error message. How convenient, again.

Nice engineering by Parallels indeed.

To answer to the main question, why backing up 160 GB takes 500 GB and not "only" 320 GB I can't answer but I wouldn't be surprised if there would be massive amounts of XML, given how "great" the system is.
 
thats a quite nice idea! i'd wish my provider would offer more than just FTP for the included backup space.

Best of luck for your restore!!
 
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