I am running Nextcloudpi 1.51.0, and there’s a backup job that runs every time I spin up the server. The problem is, it’s backing up to the same drive where I have my files, and it’s rapidly filling the entire drive. How can I cancel this job permanently? The server is useless while this continues.
A while back I tried setting up a backup to a NAS on my network of the same capacity as my NCP server. It failed due to an error I don’t recall (I’m a Linux noob). I tried to remove this backup job until I could figure out the error, and I did so by clearing all the fields in the NCP backup configuration page and hitting Apply. Instead of clearing it, it seems that it set up a new job that backs up to the data drive.
Part of the problem is that there’s no “On/Off” switch in the NCP GUI, or a list of backup jobs - only an interface to enter the backup parameters (I thought that clearing the fields and applying would remove the job):
By the way, the text in the Destination Directory field seems to be only a grayed-out example of how the destination should be formatted in the field, not an actual entry.
Thank you for the reply, schoetju. I checked the settings under periodic backups, however, and it was already set to Inactive, and I believe any entries in the backup parameter fields are defaults, because I never made changes to them:
If there is any other place to check, please let me know. If given instructions, I could check settings in Terminal, though I don’t have much experience with it.
I think for now I will remove the hard drive, delete the contents of the backup folder, and see whether the process begins again once I restart my server. If this sounds dangerous for any reason, please let me know. Thanks again.
What shows up, when you do ls -al /etc/cron.d/
On my instance (with activated ncp-backup-auto) it looks like this
On your instance (without having activated ncp-backup-auto) there should not exit anything that’s related to a backup.
BTW: Can you provide more details, why do you think, that your server is doing an automatic backup, after you start up your server?
What files / filenames do you notice as a result from this backup? Can you provide a screenshot?
I took the following screenshot. It seems that the backup job finally finished a few days ago, since posting my question. There is no backup job shown in cron:
There is evidence of the backup, however. There is a folder:
/ncdata/appdata_xxxxxxxx/backup/
that has dozens of files with names formatted as:
[date and time]-differential-[random filename]
the total size of which add up to just under 3TB. The filenames date from mid-January to just a few days ago. I was unable save a screenshot of it, however - I was running a live session of PartedMagic, and got an error when copying the jpg to a USB drive.
My guess is that a single, unscheduled backup job started, and only finished a few days ago, since I did not keep the server running for long since the trouble began.
I suppose that deleting those backup files would cause no problems. Would you agree?
FOLLOW-UP: I deleted those backup files. After spinning up again, all is working normally - no immediate maintenance mode, no more backing up. So, it seems that schoetju steered me in the right direction by showing me how to determine whether there was a continuous backup job scheduled in cron. Thanks again!
