topic Re: GAIA Backups in Firewall and Security Management

GAIA Backups

Juan_Concepcion — Fri, 13 Oct 2017 05:00:33 GMT

There exists an issue in GAIA presently where backups just continuously grow and cannot be setup to auto delete. The result is that the /var/log/ directory becomes full and then causes all types of application issues. The following will run every 2 months and auto clean any backups older than the specified number of days (30 days in example below). The reason this method is used is because the normal cron scheduler will not accept the command through webui or cli - therefore this will use the native crontab capabilities of linux to assist in cleaning up older backups.

In Gaia Clish, create a root user without capability to login:

HostName> add user jobuser uid 0 homedir /home/jobuser
HotsName> save config

Note: Avoid giving the user a password and avoid giving the user any Gaia roles as they are not needed.

In Expert mode, create a cron job for this user:
[Expert@HostName]# crontab -u jobuser -e

(This creates and allows you to edit the file /var/spool/cron/jobuser).

Syntax for Entry in crontab:

Minute	Hour	Day of Month	Month	Day of week \| Command
0	0	1	1,3,5,7,9,11	* \| /usr/bin/find /var/log/ -mtime +30 -wholename “/var/log/CPbackup/backups/*.tgz" -delete

Save the file: shift+: then x!

This will clean up backups older than 30 days @ midnight on the specified day every other month (in this example on the 1st day every two months)

Re: GAIA Backups

Kalyan_Addenki — Wed, 09 May 2018 13:18:48 GMT

It worked successfully after a slight change to the command

/usr/bin/find /var/log/CPbackup/backups/ -mtime +30 -name "*.tgz" -delete

Re: GAIA Backups

Juan_Concepcion — Wed, 09 May 2018 13:46:36 GMT

Worked for me can you provide error you are getting or simply doesn’t clean up as expected??

--Juan

Re: GAIA Backups

Kalyan_Addenki — Wed, 09 May 2018 13:52:41 GMT

Here is the error:

]# /usr/bin/find /var/log/ -mtime +30 -name "/var/log/CPbackup/backups/*.tgz" -delete
/usr/bin/find: warning: Unix filenames usually don't contain slashes (though pathnames do). That means that '-name /var/log/CPbackup/backups/*.tgz' will probably evaluate to false all the time on this system. You might find the '-wholename' test more useful, or perhaps '-samefile'. Alternatively, if you are using GNU grep, you could use 'find ... -print0 | grep -FzZ /var/log/CPbackup/backups/*.tgz'.

Re: GAIA Backups

Juan_Concepcion — Wed, 09 May 2018 13:58:00 GMT

This fixes it – I’ll update

/usr/bin/find /var/log/ -mtime +30 -wholename "/var/log/CPbackup/backups/*.tgz" -delete

Re: GAIA Backups

Kalyan_Addenki — Wed, 09 May 2018 14:05:11 GMT

That worked!

Re: GAIA Backups

simoneciotti — Fri, 23 Apr 2021 09:12:40 GMT

05 11 * * * /usr/bin/find /var/log/ -wholename "/var/log/CPbackup/backups/*.tgz" -delete

This work, every day delete old tgz file

Re: GAIA Backups

_Val_ — Fri, 23 Apr 2021 11:32:08 GMT

You do not want to delete all but the newest file, some rotation is advised. In case your OS is corrupted, the latest backup is likely to have those corrupted files, but several previous might not.