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I have 16.04 installed and it runs Backup periodically. I noticed recently that a surprising amount of disk space on my system was used, roughly 530GB out of 700GB total. Looking into the problem with the command ncdu and Disk Usage Analyzer, I saw that out of a total of 530GB used 377GB was accounted for by the folder /deja-dup! This seems way too high to me (how can the backups be so much larger than the thing they are backing up?), but I admit a thorough ignorance about how this is supposed to work. Is this abnormal?

Worryingly, I have the impression that /deja-dup is growing. My temptation is to just delete it, but I would like to have a backup program running properly. Not sure whether it is pertinent but I enter a password each time backup starts.

Any help in diagnosing this problem, or pointing me towards a solution would be greatly appreciated.

gfgm
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2 Answers2

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DejaDup has a loosely configurable scheduling policy accessible under System Settings -> Backups -> Scheduling which defaults to keeping backups forever. Depending on your use case you might find it sufficient to simply change the frequency and retention settings as shown below.

backup-settings

Note that older backups will be apparently be deleted earlier if DejaDup determines that the storage location is low on space. It appears that this doesn't always work as expected.

Community
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Elder Geek
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Its perfectly normal and have that same situation with my backup. That appears to be its way of backing up your system.

My solution is to set up what I call a fail safe evironment for my computer where I have:

  1. un-interrupted power supply,

  2. Little or no human activities around my pc

  3. Zero need for doing any work on it, then

  4. I delete the old backup and start afresh.

It creates different back ups based on the difference between new and old ones making it possible to restore to a particular point in your back up history, which as you have seen leads to massive external HDD usage.

it's features include:

  1. Support for local, remote, or cloud backup location (including services like Amazon S3 and Rackspace Cloud Files)

  2. Built-in encryption and compression support

  3. Incremental backups (so you can restore from any particular point)

  4. Scheduled backups

  5. Integrates into Nautilus and other file managers

Feature 3 means your storage device gets filled over time.

George Udosen
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