Context

I am running a large project through ploi that has lots of user files. The project is hosted on a hetzner server with the user files sitting on a mounted hetzner volume and being softlinked into the project itself. This works very well, but backups fail because the amount of data that is being collected during the backup job exceeds the amount of free space on the main disk. By now I found out that backup archives are created in /home/ploi/.ploi, which is fine for small amounts of data, but when large backups, the server's disk runs out of space and the backup fails.

I found a workaround to backup files from within softlinked folders, so that was not the issue before the backups started failing. I even tried to split the backup into multiple chunks and run them one after another, but those also fail sometimes, because old and failed backups have not been cleanup up properly sometimes and I deleted 10GB of stale backup data.

In addition I don't think renting a bigger server is the way to go, because servers are for computing and volumes are for permanent storage. So I think Ploi should be able to handle backups that include softlinks to volumes and larger amounts of data.

Solution

What would solve this problem completely would be a way to define the location of the temporary folder that is used to generate the backup archive. That way I could configure the ploi backup job to use the mounted volume and we are good to go, because there is enough space left there and I can very easily and without large cost just scale up the volume or add another one.

References

• https://ploi.io/support/14422