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Making room on server, forum getting too big


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Posted

IPB Board 3.4.1

Is there an easy to crunch my forum data to create more space on the server. My provider says it's getting too big. Full backup is taking more than 24 hours, he says.

Thanks!

Posted

255k posts isn't so much that it should take 24hrs to backup... Unless you have attachments. You can delete old attachments.

But you need to give us real stats of the system and not the forum.

How much disk space are you using?
How much space does your mysql take?

How is the backup being accomplished?
What is the type of system you're on? Shared/VPS/Dedicated?

Posted

This looks like a hosting issue as mentioned, yoru forum with a normal amount of attachments would be in the 500MB range for files, and 300-500MB range for the database (wild guess based on counts) For a total of about 1gb. This should take 15-30 minutes or so on a shared host normally. Find a better host if they don't have a better solution for you.

Posted

Bet you any money its a cpanel server, the backup process will keep pausing until the load goes below a certain level, thats why hosts disable it on shared servers.

Posted

Bet you any money its a cpanel server, the backup process will keep pausing until the load goes below a certain level, thats why hosts disable it on shared servers.

Professional hosting does not disable this due to its extreme importance... otherwise they would not be in business for long...

Posted

It looks like a cPanel server, indeed.

cPanel's backup feature used to create major load issues and take about half the day to finish up on my server some time back, and my box is hardly a slouch. During backups, the load was so high that it made using the websites on the server almost unbearable. It became frustrating to the point where we disabled cpbackup and created our own backup system using rsnapshot and a replicated MySQL server. We couldn't ask for better performance and it's more secure, as you can give the backup server access to the production server without giving the latter any access to the former - great for a disaster scenario in which the production server is compromised. :smile:

My largest site now has nearly 1.1 million posts and over 120 GB in data (attachments and images), and my nightly backups happily run every morning without driving the server load up or even locking my databases. Once you get past a certain size, cpbackup simply cannot elegantly deal with the data volume of a large account and something more robust like rsnapshot will need to be used.

Another possibility... is Logaholic enabled on the server? Logaholic's part of cpbackup's routine is rather dreadful for anything but a truly small site. Any significant amount of traffic clogs that right up, so I disabled that on my server almost as soon as the feature was released.

Talk to your host about this. Expecting them to drop in an alternative backup solution might be a bit much, but they should know better than anyone exactly why the backup is taking so long and should, at the very least, be able to disable your site's backups if that is what's causing the problem (be sure to double-check their ToS and AUP first, though; if they promise backups for sites of any size, they absolutely owe you a functional solution). Trying to shrink your site's disk space consumption for the sake of a backup routine indicates not that your site is too large, but that the backup routine is inadequate and/or the server is badly configured. If they can't get to the bottom of this, I echo the suggestion to find a new host.

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