Well, not a noob, more like an idiot 😂 EDIT: Yes, on the same drive as my Home folder, etc. And yes, technically they’re snapshots, not backups.
cries in 200 NixOS generations
I’ve been in a similar situation
edit: For context, there was a bug with the graphics driver that was putting out an error every frame, at 200+ fps… needless to say, I could actively see the log growing in size
Holy shit
right? what the hell?
Mmmm somebody need some log rotate in their life.
Oh my production s***'s on point but all the Dave and QA s*** I need at least one failure before I get around to doing law rotate. I guess I should spend the time to make the ansible job.
This is what confuses me about Linux defaults, why would it let them grow that large?
We can tune logging settings to resonable values for the max size and everything, it just doesn’t come that way for some reason.
If you don’t use archaic technologies it actually does.
systemd-journaldis limited to max(10% FS size, 4GB) per default.Well, Linux is also made for servers and super computers, and just imagine it refusing to keep logs because the file’s too large
Well it’s better than a server locking up from a full disk.
But I think it’s better for it to fail from expected behavior vs unexpected behavior. Your storage being full is very transparent and expected, but that a file reaches max size and starts cutting off is unexpected and would surprise a lot of people.
I myself use supercomputers and the log files can get into a lot of GB, and I would hate it if it just cut off at some point.
I mean that’s fair, but a supercomputer would be heavily customized so disabling log limits would be part of that if needed.
If it makes you fell any better, after doing a fresh install, I tried a “finally finished setting everything up” backup and was immediately out of space.
Turns out it was saving backups to my boot sector. 🤦🤦🤦🤦🤦🤦
93 GB is like one weekend of moderate media piracy for me…
we are all noobs in some regard. I’ve been using linux for private and work for 3 years and I don’t know shit about tineshift. linux is such a diverse ecosystem and there’s so many places to make mistakes and learn. It never stops. I fully expect to be bricking my machine on accident well into my 60s
I have been using Linux for over 20 years and this post is the first time I’ve heard about timeshift. I use Arch, btw.
ironically, arch users are the only users who I’ve heard talking about timeshift because apparently its the best way to roll back after an update breaks sth?
Timeshift plus the package that automatically takes a snapshot on system update is so clutch.
Learning about new things is the best thing about Linux. I keep a folder with screenshots and saved html pages for all the fixes, workarounds and settings I’ve accumulated over the two years I’ve used Linux on my desktop. Highly recommend keeping a similar folder.
Yup.
Every time I fix something difficult I document it in great detail in Obsidian. It’s a good feeling of, ‘‘I’ll never have to be confused by this problem again’’.
I reference it constantly too, so it isn’t a waste of time. The waste of time would be not doing it.
I just edit my configuration.nix and commit it to source control. The commit message is the documentation. If I’m feeling extra generous I’d add a comment
Everytime I stumble upon something it take some quick notes and put “I should start blogging this” on my bucket list. Then immediately forget about the blogging part until I take the next note…
I had a bunch of old nix generations I wasn’t using, cleaned those up and got hundeeds of gigabytes of free space
“Backups” to the same disk?
Personally i use them in case an update messes stuff up. So i can restore it back.
So not backups, but snapshots.
Yeah, snapshots. It would make more sense to store them on a different drive, but I can’t add an additional drive into my PC (it’s a prebuilt so I’m waiting until I can afford a new PC) and I can’t be bothered with saving them to an external hard drive.
To be fair, I wouldn’t consider storing it on one additional drive in the same PC to be backup either. One theft, lightning strike, fire or even just a stupid mistake on your own part and that “backup” is a goner
pip cache is another common culprit, I’ve seen up to 50GB
node_modules has entered the chat
There was once a 220 GB log file on my pi-hole server. Probably was a bug though.
I recently realized I forgot to use reflink copy on an XFS filesystem and ran duperemove which freed ~600GB of data
The humble 50GB /var/cache/pacman/pkg on my 256GB drive.
I use borg btw.
Best thing that I’ve ever done was to write automate a weekly script that makes a ZFS snapshot and then deletes any that are over a month old.
That’s a very good idea. Might wanna keep an additional yearly one too though, in case you don’t use the computer actively for a while and realize you have to go back more than a month at some point.
Ya, I offsite backup the entire zpool once a year at least. I have quarterly and yearly snapshots too.
But the weeklies have saved me on several occasions, the others haven’t been needed yet.
“dust” is my go-to cli thing for finding what’s taking up hard drive space.
Speaking of, I should check my timeshirt settings
ncdu or gtfo
400 gb of timeshift backups… It felt so good removing them XDDD
