# Suddenly having backup failures
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/suddenly-having-backup-failures/279439
**Category:** Self-hosting
**Tags:** backups
**Created:** [September 18, 2023, 9:01pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/suddenly-having-backup-failures/279439 "2023-09-18T21:01:25Z")
**Posts on this page:** 4
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@carmiac](https://meta.discourse.org/u/carmiac)
#### Post date: [September 18, 2023, 9:01pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/suddenly-having-backup-failures/279439/1 "2023-09-18T21:01:25Z")
I’ve started having backup failures after a recent update. Looking through the log, it seems that the issue is caused by a lack of disk space:
```plaintext
[2023-09-18 20:30:34] EXCEPTION: /var/www/discourse/lib/discourse.rb:138:in `exec': Failed to gzip archive.
gzip: /var/www/discourse/public/backups/default/aoda-forum-2023-09-18-202648-v20230913194832.tar.gz: No space left on device
```
However, `df -h` gives 7.5GB free. I’m backing up to AWS, and user uploads are at 5.9GB. Digging a little deeper, I did find that `/var/lib/docker/aufs` is using 15GB while `/var/discourse` uses 12GB. There are no other containers, services, etc on this machine.
I have, of course, already run `launcher cleanup`.
In short, my questions are:
1. What is going on with the backups? Is it really disk space related or something else?
2. `/var/aufs/` seems to be using a lot of space. Is there a safe way to clean that up?
---
### Author:  [@pfaffman](https://meta.discourse.org/u/pfaffman)
#### Post date: [September 19, 2023, 7:51am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/suddenly-having-backup-failures/279439/2 "2023-09-19T07:51:21Z")
> [@carmiac](#):
>
> However, `df -h` gives 7.5GB free. I’m backing up to AWS, and user uploads are at 5.9GB
You need enough space to hold the uncompressed database and the images.
---
### Author:  [@pfaffman](https://meta.discourse.org/u/pfaffman)
#### Post date: [June 7, 2024, 12:38am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/suddenly-having-backup-failures/279439/4 "2024-06-07T00:38:38Z")
Did you gzip problem solve itself? There have been adding strange issues around gzip lately.
---
### Author:  [@Genisis](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Genisis)
#### Post date: [June 7, 2024, 1:34am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/suddenly-having-backup-failures/279439/5 "2024-06-07T01:34:51Z")
nope, had was to manually gzip the backup, I let the backup run normally, go into the folder where it saves it, when its about to gzip I stoped the app quickly and gzip the backup and was finally able to change host, now im just having issues with uploading videos, even as small as 40MB (yes I know its not optimized but its inconsistent)