mysterious tgz files in dumps folder

[juc1]

Hi all,

Recently my domain went down and the problem turned out to be that I had exceeded my 40 GB hard disk space. I thought this was strange because my data on this VPS is only about 15 GB ie nowhere near 40 GB. On further investigation I found that my dumps folder is getting filled up with tgz files and I have no idea where these files are coming from. For example on the date August 21 there are about 100 of these tgz files some of which you can see here:

98

If I download and unzip these files they seem to be the files from various content management systems which I don't use on this VPS have never heard of and have not asked to go to my dumps folder.

99

Any ideas on where these files are coming from or how I can find out?

Thanks

[suwunk]

Hope this discussion on Parallels forums helps
Plesk Backup /var/lib/psa/dumps full - Parallels Forums (http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=94289)

Here's another solution:

Our hosted server recently ran out of disk space – an awkward situation. A little research revealed that /var/lib contained quite a lot of data – about 33GB more than we were expecting, most of it in /var/lib/psa/dumps/tmp.

Turns out that this is where Plesk puts its temporary files when doing backups, and for some reason they weren’t getting removed, and in our case, they totalled 33GB. So… first of all we removed them, and then set about making sure the situation didn’t happen again.

Chris Meller notes that sometimes the permissions on the directory get broken (such as when you restore from a backup), so I made sure that it was owner/group psaadm:psaadm and then, just to be sure, added a quick nightly cron job for root that runs the following script to remove any temporary files older than 90 days. Job done.

#!/bin/sh
#
# Delete backup more than 90 days old.
#
backupDir="/var/lib/psa/dumps/tmp"
#
daysToKeep=90

echo "Checking for files older than $daysToKeep days in $backupDir"
listOfFiles=`find $backupDir -mtime +$daysToKeep`
if [ ! -z $listOfFiles ]
then
echo "Found [$listOfFiles]"
else
echo "None found."
fi
for toDelete in $listOfFiles
do
echo "Deleting $toDelete"
rm -rf $toDelete
done
echo "Done."

Source: How to save 33GB of disk space (or… Managing Plesk Backups) – Agile software development processes, stories and lessons learnt (http://www.blackpepper.co.uk/black-pepper-blog/How-to-save-33GB-of-disk-space-or...-Managing-Plesk-Backups-.html)

[juc1]

Hope this discussion on Parallels forums helps
Plesk Backup /var/lib/psa/dumps full - Parallels Forums (http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=94289)

Here's another solution:
I think that these are more about how to monitor disk usage and delete files but mine is a slightly different question = how to tell where these tgz files are coming from. I have now deleted about 20GB worth of tgz files. It seems strange if there is no log etc to say why or how these files are being generated. Anyway I expect to be migrating to a new VPS soon so I am hoping that this problem will be left behind on the old VPS.

Thanks