On Mon, 1 Oct 2012, Craig White wrote:
On Oct 1, 2012, at 11:24 AM, Tim Dunphy wrote:
I am soliciting opinion here as opposed technical help with an idea I have. I've setup a bacula backup system on an AWS volume. Bacula stores a LOT of information in it's mysql database (in my setup, you can also use postgres or sqlite if you chose). Since I've started doing this I notice that the mysql data directory has swelled to over 700GB! That's quite a lot and its' easting up valuable disk space.
I use Bacula and I prefer PostgreSQL over MySQL but regardless… the database grows as the number of files that are backed up (without purges) grows. Thus you should probably be considering some type of rotation which regularly purges old backups on a regular basis.
There are two other things you can do, assuming you have time windows between backups:
1. Run Bacula's dbcheck utility in fix (-f) mode. My observation is that even with regular pruning, Bacula won't get all the kruft out of the MySQL tables. dbcheck is more thorough.
2. Every one once in a while -- again, assuming you have a big enough time window -- it can be useful to run mysqlcheck in optimize (-o) mode against the Bacula database. Doing so cleans up the MySQL data files and can free up a lot of space in your filesystem.
Read the man pages before embarking on these operations and make sure you have a known-good copy of the database in case mischief ensues (which has never happened to me, but it's always a possibility).