# 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:** 1\
**Showing post:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![carmiac](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/carmiac/32/77923_2.png) [@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")

</div>

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?

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_[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/suddenly-having-backup-failures/279439)._