SOAR - ibackup fails to clean up <$PHANTOM_HOME>/data/ibackup directory

Applicability

Description

The <$PHANTOM_HOME>/data/ibackup have been growing unexpectedly fast.

Investigation

Using "crontab -l" to show cron job for phantom user, the daily incremental backup was disabled. It was configured running weekly full back up only.

The <$PHANTOM_HOME>/etc/pgbackrest.conf has default “repo1-retention-archive-type=incr“ when ibackup was configured. This attribute is telling pgbackrest to clean up the <$PHANTOM_HOME>/data/ibackup/repo/pg/archive/phantom/15-1/ only when the incremental backup is run. Because the system has only full backup running, pgbackrest never kicks in and therefore the archive folder keeps growing.

Resolution

The pgBackRest does backup of DB files but it never cleans up the unused incremental files. Here are the recommendations:

Option #1: Manually disabling incremental backups in pgbackrest.conf. The default settings from ibackup mean:

• repo1-retention-full=1: This setting dictates that pgBackRest will retain only the most recent full backup in repository repo1. When a new full backup is successfully completed, the oldest full backup (and any differential or incremental backups that depend solely on it) will be expired and removed.

• repo1-retention-archive-type=incr: This parameter specifies that when determining the retention for Write-Ahead Log (WAL) archives, pgBackRest should count all backup types: full, differential, and incremental.

• repo1-retention-archive=2: This setting, in conjunction with repo1-retention-archive-type=incr, means that pgBackRest will retain WAL archives for the last two full, differential, or incremental backups.

The following modified settings as an example:

• repo1-retention-full=1: This setting instructs pgBackRest to retain only the most recent full backup in repository repo1. When a new full backup is successfully completed, the oldest full backup (and any differential or incremental backups that depend solely on it) will be expired and removed.

• repo1-retention-archive-type=full: This parameter specifies that when determining the retention for Write-Ahead Log (WAL) archives, pgBackRest should count only full backups.

• repo1-retention-archive=1: This setting, in conjunction with repo1-retention-archive-type=full, means that pgBackRest will retain WAL archives for the last full backup.

Option #2: Use current settings and running an incremental backup occasionally to make sure that it’s cleaned out.