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I am running rsnapshot, and certain backups are taking up a lot of space. I've run rsnapshot-diff, and it gives results like this:

Between /home/backups/hourly.4/mybackupdir/ and /home/backups/daily.0/mybackupdir/:
  1705 were added, taking 15518770836 bytes;
  1705 were removed, saving 15518443844 bytes;

...but an rsnapshot du shows that the backup set takes up the advertised 15 GB or so. If I tell it to produce verbose rsnaphot-diff output, it appears to show that the same files were added and removed, so I'm somewhat confused as to why it's using up so much space - is there something wrong with the rsnapshot process that's causing it to use the extra space or something?

ticktockhouse
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  • It sounds like every single file is being backed up again, and the actual order of operation is that all of the old versions of the files were removed and all of the new versions of the files are now stored. – DerfK Jan 14 '17 at 00:32
  • Thanks, but why would this be? Is it an issue with rsnapshot? Is there some configuration I can tweak? – ticktockhouse Jan 14 '17 at 12:22

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Sorry to answer my own question, but I think I've worked it out.

I'm dumping out the mysql databases every night, and these are currently occupying the magic 15GB in terms of disk space. I think that these files are different on a daily basis, and so rsnapshot backs up the difference as it is supposed to.

Because I'm keeping 7 daily and 4 weekly backups of this particular dataset, this unfortunately adds an extra 180GB overall!

ticktockhouse
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