Performing backups when /home is taking up 96% of total space

[Jorel]

I have a dedicated cPanel server with two one terabytes hard drives in a RAID 1 configuration. In my haste to get the server up and running, I did not notice that my provider setup /home to have 897 GB of space. In the past I've had a separate /backup partition with an equal amount of space setup as /home. I would put my backups in /home/backups but cPanel warns against it. I want to backup all of my cPanel accounts locally, but I can't just put them in /backups our they will count towards root's tiny disk space allotment. I want to setup local backups without adversely affecting my customers' data or causing any downtime. I'm running CentOS release 6.5. Any ideas?

Edit: as you can see, /home isn't using up 96% of total space, it's just that almost all of the space is reserved for /home. Why OVH does this by default is beyond me.

[email protected] [~]# df -BG
Filesystem 1G-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
rootfs 20G 15G 5G 76% /
/dev/root 20G 15G 5G 76% /
devtmpfs 8G 1G 8G 1% /dev
/dev/md2 897G 116G 736G 14% /home
tmpfs 8G 0G 8G 0% /dev/shm
/dev/loop0 1G 1G 1G 4% /tmp
/dev/loop0 1G 1G 1G 4% /var/tmp

[email protected] [~]# cat /etc/fstab
/dev/md1 / ext4 errors=remount-ro,usrjquota=quota.user,jqfmt=vfsv0 0 1
/dev/md2 /home ext4 usrjquota=quota.user,jqfmt=vfsv0 0 2
/dev/sda3 none swap defaults 0 0
/dev/sdb3 none swap defaults 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs defaults 0 0
tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts defaults 0 0

 

[Infopro]

Any ideas?

Adding another drive for backups might be a good one.

 

[cPanelMichael]

Hello

Have you already added and activated accounts? If not, I suggest reinstalling the OS with a new partition setup if possible.

Thank you.

 

[Jorel]

The server is already in production with several hundred active accounts. Adding another hard drive is not an option. Are there any other options out there? Are local backups totally out of the question without re-installing? What about remote backups?

 

[cPanelMichael]

You can use the local drive, but it's going to result in issues with the disk space usage/quotas of your accounts. The use of "Remote Backups" indicate the use of a remote server that backups are uploaded to via a service such as FTP.

Thank you.

 

[Jorel]

You can use the local drive, but it's going to result in issues with the disk space usage/quotas of your accounts. The use of "Remote Backups" indicate the use of a remote server that backups are uploaded to via a service such as FTP.

Thank you.

Thank you for your reply. So it is safe to use /home/backups as the backup destination but I can expect disk space usage issues such as everyone's account quota showing their normal usage + backup usage?

 

[cPanelMichael]

Thank you for your reply. So it is safe to use /home/backups as the backup destination but I can expect disk space usage issues such as everyone's account quota showing their normal usage + backup usage?

Yes, that is correct.

Thank you.