[Box Backup] Can total hardlimitsize exceed partitionsize?

[Chris Wilson]

Hi Robin,

On Wed, 4 Feb 2009, Robin Harteveld wrote:

> I have a central boxbackup server with 125 stores on it. The size of the 
> partition with the stores is 7.5TB.

Wow, that's a huge partition. What's it made of and what filesystem do you 
use on it?

> Stores are from different users. They difference is size ( 10GB - 20GB - 
> 40GB - 100GB). The hardlimit is set to "softlimit+10GB".
>
> Sometimes a users adds more then 10 Gb to his store. In some cases the 
> hardlimit gets full.  I noticed that when a users cleans-up. The filed 
> are not marked as old files. That way the store stays full. The only way 
> to fix this, is to increase the hardlimit. Old-files are marked. 
> house-keeping does its job and new files come in.

The deleted files are supposed to be marked as deleted, not old. This is 
supposed to happen even if the store is full. I.e. the boxbackup client is 
supposed to continue going through the store and marking locally deleted 
files as deleted on the store, but not uploading any more, when the store 
is full. If that's not happening, then it's a bug in the client and I'd 
like to know more about it.

> We use boxbackup 0.11rc2. on a Linux Centos 4.4 servers. (clients and 
> server)
>
> And now the question:
>
> Is it possible to configure all stores to a hardlimit of 120 GB?   Or is
> this a problem with the capacity of the harddisk ( 125x 120Gb = 15 TB)
> None of the stores will actually get that big and we will be monitoring the
> freedisk-space.
>
> Does boxbackup reserve the diskspace needed by the hardlimit?

No, the space is not reserved. Overcommitting your disk space is possible 
and allowed. However recent clients basically ignore the softlimit and 
will keep backing up files until they reach the hardlimit. Therefore I'd 
recommend that you closely monitor free disk space and actual usage by the 
clients. If the disk does actually fill up then clients will start getting 
bad errors during uploads, and your and their bandwidth usage will 
increase a lot.

Cheers, Chris.
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