0

I'm taking a snapshot of a server running in rackspace each day and initially it was 1GB, then around 25GB when actual disk space used was that amount. I then moved data from the boot partition to block storage and the disk space used is now only 7GB but snapshots continue to be 25GB+. How can I reduce the snapshot sizes?

I have looked at the following ways to free up disk space but none of those have reduced the size.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/5980/how-do-i-free-up-disk-space

Community
  • 1
larsen161
  • 161
  • 1
  • 11

1 Answers1

0

It is probably a similar problem as with SSDs. Removing file from filesystem does not remove the data itself. Just metadata. You need to enable discard (trim) to throw away the data blocks.

I have not worked with Rackspace cloud, so I can not tell you if Rackspace storage supports this, or not. Quick googling did not tell.

Another thing worth mentioning is incremental snapshots. It seems it is supported. That way, your snapshot only contains what has changed since the last snapshot. That should yield initial 25G snapshot and rather small following snapshots.

Fox
  • 3,977
  • 18
  • 23
  • tried fstrim -v to clear up the data blocks but that operation isn't supported. Contacted support and looks like it's related to the VHD format being used and the VDI chain. https://community.rackspace.com/products/f/25/t/3778 – larsen161 May 14 '15 at 23:07