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Incremental backups do not remove old files deleted from customer's account?

electric
Hello, We are seeing that the incremental backup method does not remove/delete old files from the backup that were deleted from the customer's account. So for example, let's say you have daily incremental backup configured. 1. On Monday night, the daily backup runs and creates the backup for all the customer's files. Let's say they have a file called "/home/customer1/public_html/largefile.mp4". This file is copied over to the incremental backup location. 2. Now on Tuesday during the day (before the daily backup process runs), the customer deletes the "/home/customer1/public_html/largefile.mp4" file from their account. 3. On Tuesday night, the daily backup runs and all modified files are copied over to the incremental backup location. The "/home/customer1/public_html/largefile.mp4" file is left in the incremental backup location and never deleted, even though it no longer exists in the customer's account. Is this expected behavior? Or is there a "sync files" or "delete old files" option that I am not seeing? If this is working as designed, then the very obvious problems with this "never delete files in the backup location" behavior are: 1. If we need to restore the account from backup, it will also restore all these old files that the customer previously deleted. The customer might have deleted the files 5 months ago, but they'll be restored to the account as if they were never deleted. 2. The backup location will eventually get larger and larger as more and more files are never deleted... My understanding of the "incremental backup" behavior is that it should essentially be like an "rsync --delete" functionality. (Synchronize the customers current account files to the incremental backup location, copying only files that have changed, and deleting files that have been removed.) Let me know. Thanks!

Comments

9 comments

Date Votes
  • cPanelMichael
    Hello :) Your understanding of how it should work is correct. This is possibly related to internal case number 108237. Could you confirm if this is happening directly on daily incremental backups, or only when the daily backups are synced to the weekly backups? Also, what version of cPanel is installed on your system? Thank you.
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  • chalupa
    I was wondering how to get some more information about this kind of occurance and that internal case number 108237. I have a similar issue where a customer has incremental backups and the dailys are removing files that are not in the user's accounts, but the weekly are not removing extraneous files that are not in the user's homedir space.
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  • cPanelMichael
    Internal case FB-108237 is still open to address an issue where when you delete files from an account and then run incremental backups, the daily backups are updated appropriately (the file is removed from the backup). However, when the daily backups are copied to weekly backups, the deleted files are not removed from the weekly backup, causing the weekly backups to grow in size. There's currently no time frame for a resolution, however I have linked this thread to the internal case so our developers are aware of it. Thank you.
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  • chalupa
    AH ok. So there is no resolution on this at the moment then? This would be a +1 for this type of issue then!
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  • cPanelMichael
    So there is no resolution on this at the moment then?

    The case is still open at this time, so there's currently no specific time frame available for a resolution. You can monitor our
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  • kdean
    Any progress on this to report? Still remains a problem with backup bloat.
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  • cPanelMichael
    Any progress on this to report? Still remains a problem with backup bloat.

    There's no update to report at this time, however progress has started on this feature, which should address the problem: Support for remote incremental backups Thank you.
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  • electric
    Hello, This seems to still be a problem. We have some customers who have removed large files from their account,... but the incremental backup folder still includes those files in their backup. This is becoming a serious problem, because our backup drives are getting full... and it's from files that don't even exist any more in the source location. Is this actually by design? Or is there a configuration option somewhere that I'm not seeing? How can we enable the incremental backup system to delete files that don't exist any more? Just like the "--delete" flag in rsync. Thanks.
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  • cPanelMichael
    Hello @electric, I've reproduced this issue in newer versions of cPanel and opened internal case CPANEL-8853 to report the issue again. I'll update this thread with more information on the status of this case as it becomes available. Thank you. Update: The issue is no longer reproducible as of cPanel version 70.
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