6 Replies Latest reply on Jul 19, 2017 10:09 AM by tim.latona

    Ever increasing backup size?

    tim.latona
    tim.latona Jul 19, 2017 8:08 AM

      Hi,

       

      I'm trying to figure out why our nightly backups are increasing by as much as 1gb every evening, even though I'm not seeing a commensurate increase in disk usage. We've gone from having a backup that was sized at 25gb in mid-February to over 60gb last night.

       

      Looking at the server space usage view, we've actually decreased the amount of space being used on the worker boxes, but backups have increased in size still.

       

       

      I have run tabadmin cleanup both with server running and stopped, reindexed, as well as rebooted all servers in the cluster.

       

      Anyone aware of temp files/logs that aren't cleaned up as part of the above commands that I can safely remove? I definitely don't want to be in a position where we have a 100gb backup (that takes 3 hours to run) each evening.

        • 1. Re: Ever increasing backup size?
          Jeff Strauss
          Jeff Strauss Ambassador Jul 19, 2017 8:17 AM (in response to tim.latona)

          1. what release of software are you running?

           

          2. are you running a cluster with multiple nodes?

           

          3. if the answer to #2 above is yes, then is disk space being used more heavily on the distributed nodes?

           

          4. are you leveraging tde's?

          • 2. Re: Ever increasing backup size?
            tim.latona
            tim.latona Jul 19, 2017 9:23 AM (in response to Jeff Strauss)

            Jeff Strauss, thanks for the help

             

            1) 10.0.1 server

            2) 3 node cluster

            3) It does look like worker 1 is using a little more disk space, screenshot below

            4) lots of .tde files, but we have done quite a bit of cleanup in the past few weeks which should have reduced their overall impact (deleting a few 3-4gb extracts)

             

            There's a little difference in size of the Tableau folders, 197gb on worker1 and 184gb on worker2

             

             

            edit to note that the primary differences between the two nodes are in: vizqlserver (w1 is1.7gb bigger), temp (w1 is 4gb bigger)

            • 3. Re: Ever increasing backup size?
              Jeff Strauss
              Jeff Strauss Ambassador Jul 19, 2017 9:58 AM (in response to tim.latona)

              The backup picks up the tde's which I will assume in your instance is on worker1 and worker2.  So if these have somehow grown (even with your cleanup activity in place), then this will cause backups to be larger.  Also, I've seen mention in the Tableau release notes of patches mentioning clean up of temp space, old extracts, etc.  But I can't find these right off hand since the release notes nowadays aren't so easily searchable.

              • 4. Re: Ever increasing backup size?
                tim.latona
                tim.latona Jul 19, 2017 10:01 AM (in response to Jeff Strauss)

                Understood, I'm 100% sure that our extracts haven't grown by that much. I'm curious if there's an issue, when large tdes are deleted, of remnants of it remaining. I'm going to open a support case, will post back here if resolved.

                • 5. Re: Ever increasing backup size?
                  Jeff Strauss
                  Jeff Strauss Ambassador Jul 19, 2017 10:05 AM (in response to tim.latona)

                  one more thought for you.  Are you using revision history?  If so, this can cause backup size to grow as it keeps revisions of workbooks / datasources.

                  • 6. Re: Ever increasing backup size?
                    tim.latona
                    tim.latona Jul 19, 2017 10:09 AM (in response to Jeff Strauss)

                    Ohhh, that's a promising idea...we are keeping revision history...and 25 of them at that. Looking into that now and will test taking that number down to 5 or so in our QA cluster to see what happens.

                     

                    Great thought!