Run out of space on Digital Ocean Droplet, can't update/restore

[Sikamikanico (Jon Clarke)]

Okay, to set the appropriate scene - linux and command line interfaces are not my speciality, so please use big words and clear steps in your replies

So I run a fairly active forum, and we noticed some perf issues, so we increased the size of our DO droplet. This went successfully yesterday, and all was well, though we noted we were low on space overall. Unfortunately, we forgot that a backup was scheduled and overnight, the drive was filled.

The forum became inaccessible. To remedy this, as we could no longer gain access to the discourse admin dashboard, we powered down, and doubled our space.

When resizing the Droplet, the block device is increased when the resize uses the CPU, Memory and Disk option. In most cases, the next boot will detect this within the software running on the Droplet and kick off some steps to update this. In short, the disk has increased in size but needs to update to be properly reflected and I can’t seem to get it to do that because the disk was at 100% usage.

As mentioned, I’m not an expert - I need to understand what I can delete from the /var folder to be able to bring this all back to life without losing the forum itself.

If I look in the /var/backups folder, I see lots of files - can I delete the entire folder, or only certain files? Is there something else I can try to bring this back to life?

If I try: ./launcher cleanup, I get the following error:

This was moderately terrifying and I didn’t continue in case it wiped everything.

If anyone can help/offer advice, I’d really appreciate it.

Thanks!

[IAmGav (Gavin Perch)]

Did you by any chance update the OS from 16 to 20 ?

[Sikamikanico (Jon Clarke)]

Not sure what you’re referring to there - Discourse itself was fairly up to date, but I didn’t manually update anything. As I said, the issue is 100% related to space on the drive. The fact that it’s full is preventing me from taking most actions. And as I’m not an expert, I’m floundering trying to not make more of a mess.

Edit:

So this would indicate a large number of backups taking up unnecessary space on the drive. how do I delete them manually? Can I just delete the entire folder or do I go file by file?

[IAmGav (Gavin Perch)]

you can really clearup some space in

/var/discourse/shared/standalone/backups/default

just keep the latest 2 and get rid of the rest

[Sikamikanico (Jon Clarke)]

Great - how does one do that though? Is it just:

rm file_1.txt for example (once I’m in the correct directory?)

or rather:

rm xboxera-2021-10-20-003257-v20210928161912.tar ?

[IAmGav (Gavin Perch)]

@Sikamikanico

rm xboxera-2021-10-20-003257-v20210928161912.tar ?

yes, there should not be any tar files only .tar.gz

delete anything that is before oct 2021

[Sikamikanico (Jon Clarke)]

Thank you very much for the quick assistance.

[Jagster (Jakke Lehtonen)]

@IAmGav

/var/discourse/shared/standalone/backups/default

Sorry I’m cutting in, but is there something else that should clean every now and then?

[IAmGav (Gavin Perch)]

After an app rebuild in the console, you can run ./launcher cleanup and that will clean up some old files.

The backups can be deleted from The GUI as well.

Discourse default setting is to retain 5 backups.

You can go into admin > backups and see the backups

[JammyDodger]

@Sikamikanico

If I try: ./launcher cleanup, I get the following error:

This was moderately terrifying and I didn’t continue in case it wiped everything.

This is quite normal. It’s a warning rather than an error. There’s another one after it as well that also requires a confirmation to continue. @IAmGav can probably explain them better than I can.