Huge backup of pfsense

gusto

I am using the current pfsense 2.7.2-RELEASE (amd64) KVM. I regularly backup my KVM. When I installed pfSense ver 2.4.5 (5 years ago), the first backup was 546MB in size. I tested NTOP later, but after a while I uninstalled it.
After uninstalling NTOP, I made a backup of KVM and it was 2.8GB in size.

There were probably some logs and statistics left, so I did

du -h / | grep '^[0-9\.]\+G' | sort -nr

3.5G	/
1.7G	/usr
1.5G	/var
1.2G	/var/db/ntowebp
1.2G	/var/db
1.2G	/usr/local

I deleted the folder.

rm -rf /var/db/ntowebp

The next backup was already 2.4GB in size. However, the backup is a huge 546MB vs 2.4GB compared to the first backup.
As for the packages used, I only have 2

cron
openvpn-client-export

What could be the reason for such a large backlog?

darcey

Do you have trim enabled in the guest? tunefs -p / plus any necessary config in kvm for the virtual disk?
FWIW I have similar directory usage to you but my guest disk backup is always ~1GB.

Gertjan

@gusto said in Huge backup of pfsense:

What could be the reason for such a large backlog?

Open the config.xml file and look for a very big section ?

Or console (ssh) or even better : use sftp (ftp over ssh, install for example winscp) and look what folders are 'big'.
Check everything under /var/
Start by checking everything /var/log/..... and sub folders.

stephenw10

Presumably you made some other backups between 2.4.5 and 2.7.2? Did the sizes increase steadily?