# Disk usage spike during backup, Discourse crashed hard :-( **URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/disk-usage-spike-during-backup-discourse-crashed-hard/157675 **Category:** Self-hosting **Tags:** server-resources **Created:** [July 14, 2020, 6:50am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/disk-usage-spike-during-backup-discourse-crashed-hard/157675 "2020-07-14T06:50:36Z") **Posts on this page:** 1 **Showing post:** 15
### Author: ![riking](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/riking/32/170938_2.png) [@riking](https://meta.discourse.org/u/riking) #### Post date: [July 14, 2020, 9:14pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/disk-usage-spike-during-backup-discourse-crashed-hard/157675/15 "2020-07-14T21:14:32Z")
> [@pnoeric](#): > > Here’s my 7-day disk usage. It was climbing steadily from the images being imported, but you can see where it slammed up to 100% at 5:30am: Yep, that’s obviously a backup. > [@DBHacker](#): > > Not to rain on this parade, but actually, from reading the posts, there is no solid confirmation that the Discourse backup process is causing the problem. > > Why not confirm 100% that this problem is caused by a daily backup process? There are more than one processes running daily crontab files on hosts. Nah, there’s plenty of confirmation: spikes are on a 2 day interval with one exception, and the backup frequency is set to 2 days. Past experience on Meta has shown exactly this failure mode, too. > [@mcdanlj](#): > > (With nearly 100GB of images on my server, I do Discourse scheduled backups without uploads, but with thumbnails. Then I do an offsite file-based offset backup of the backups directory first and the uploads directory second. I have tested this for recovery; it was the basis of a site migration I did last year. Storing 100GB tarballs every night would be crazy.) Yup, this is a solid plan for moving forwards. The first recommendation for people who start to hit the disk space limit on their VPS is **off-machine upload storage** with the [S3 mechanism](https://meta.discourse.org/t/using-object-storage-for-uploads-s3-clones/148916/1), though. --- _[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/disk-usage-spike-during-backup-discourse-crashed-hard/157675)._