After migration, backup takes 4 x more

Support
1

I restored the images by hand - I copied them from the old hosting. And everything works but there is a problem with backup now it takes 4x more GB with the same settings.

Any way to clear all unnecessary files ?

2

Probably due to retina image sizing because multiple copies of the images are needed depending on the resolution of the users device.

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3

Could we get a backup option that only covers original assets? Understand it would mean a bunch of reprocessing in any restore, but wearing my ops hat for a moment it would really help with local disk space and shipping between systems.

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4

Okay, but why does a copy of the same thing just take 4x more after migration?

after all, it’s still exactly the same files and the same content. I don’t understand where that comes from.

5

It’s mostly a caching thing, otherwise you’d have to re-render the images at smaller sizes on the fly which would be extremely computationally intensive.

You’re right that backups can probably skip this part though @stephen and I know @sam has mentioned this in the past? The only downside is restoring a backup becomes very CPU intensive as the backup must then re-render all the resolutions, but that’s not a serious downside in my book – unless you’re in a hurry, or have a CPU underpowered server perhaps?

6

I can’t speak for everyone but I would prefer the option to eat a short term CPU hit regenerating assets over needing to allocate 4x more disk for backups.

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7

How do you do that ??

8

That’s how backups work. By default, thumbnails aren’t included in backups. We changed that at least a year ago.

You can configure that behavior with the include_thumbnails_in_backups site setting.

Include generated thumbnails in backups. Disabling this will make backups smaller, but requires a rebake of all posts after a restore.

@eextra I’d recommend creating a file based diff of the content of an old and new backup in order to find out why the backup is so much larger.

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10

My bad – thanks for the clarification @gerhard :beers: … I do think that’s the better default.

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