Do a real cleanup of unused files

[Tacioandrade]

Guys, I have a PBS on a client that has 94% of datastore usage and to free up space I went to some old backups that I kept only by history and used the "Permanently forget group" option.

I did that and after doing that, I had PBS run Prune and also the Garbege Collector, however the storage continues with exactly the same space used.
I would like to know from friends if I did something wrong or what I could do to make sure that everything is right and how to proceed to clean this space, because I am afraid of running out of space to run jobs during the week.

To make sure I didn't do anything wrong, I went there and had the number of versions of each backup reduced, I ran Prune and Garbege Collector again and the GC result:

2023-04-02T23:46:09-03:00: Removed garbage: 0 B
2023-04-02T23:46:09-03:00: Removed chunks: 0
2023-04-02T23:46:09-03:00: Pending removals: 1.335 TiB (in 774545 chunks)
2023-04-02T23:46:09-03:00: Original data usage: 19.205 TiB
2023-04-02T23:46:09-03:00: On-Disk usage: 2.093 TiB (10.90%)
2023-04-02T23:46:09-03:00: On-Disk chunks: 1232176
2023-04-02T23:46:09-03:00: Deduplication factor: 9.18
2023-04-02T23:46:09-03:00: Average chunk size: 1.781 MiB
2023-04-02T23:46:09-03:00: TASK OK

From what I understand it has Pending removals: 1,335 TiB (in 774545 chunks), but they weren't done! I wanted to know how to force this removal!

To be sure if something was removed or not, I used the command du -hs /mnt/pbs01 and gave the same space used, either before and after running Prune and GC.

 

[floh8]

search the forum u will find the answer

 

[Neobin]

From what I understand it has Pending removals: 1,335 TiB (in 774545 chunks), but they weren't done!

You have to wait at least 24h and 5m and then run the GC again:
https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/backup-client.html#client-garbage-collection

 

[Tacioandrade]

search the forum u will find the answer

Searching better I found the information that cleaning is only really performed after 24 hours and 5 minutes of prune apparently.

But in this case I would like to see a way to try to do it before. There was less than 50GB released on PBS, I ended up deleting an extra datastore that we used completely to gain more space and not stop the backups, today we have 200GB, but I don't know if it's enough. =(

You have to wait at least 24h and 5m and then run the GC again:
https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/backup-client.html#client-garbage-collection

I had found this information later (here it was already 2 am), but I needed to find a way to reduce this time. I ended up deleting a not so important datastore that I used to free up more space for PBS, if I don't find a way to free up that unused space by 8 pm here in Brazil, I'll have to pray that the 200GB I freed will take care of the backup (I believe so, but you never know what users have added to a fileserver. hehehehe)

 

[floh8]

of course, there is always a risk left. so u have to extend your datastore pool as fast as possible. good luck!
also u should include your pbs storage in your monitoring system.

 

[Tacioandrade]

of course, there is always a risk left. so u have to extend your datastore pool as fast as possible. good luck!
also u should include your pbs storage in your monitoring system.

Luckily the day after the problem, it only added 60GB to the 200GB free and I was able to wait for the GC to work.

In case my pool meets my needs, I was syncing information from one namespace to another and the process took up most of the PBS space. But after removing these backups, I managed to make the used space drop to 70% which is within my reality.

However, a great option would be to see the possibility of reducing this time for times of need like this.

 

[susie]

wait for at least 24h and 5m and ater then run the GC again