Backup, Backup and More Backup

[langenet]

I'm having issues with BLBackup and in my investigation see that the HS4 folder is now 17,xxx files while HS3 was just under 8k. Is this usual? Seems rather large by comparison.

[rmasonjr]

I have roughly 14548 files in the HS4 folder including all sub-folders...

[TC1]

I'm having issues with BLBackup and in my investigation see that the HS4 folder is now 17,xxx files while HS3 was just under 8k. Is this usual? Seems rather large by comparison.

I think it all comes down to how many plugins you have installed, don't forget they will create folders and data under the HS install root folder.

Here's my installation size for comparison:



What's the advantage of using BLBackup? Why not just use a free backup program that operates independently of HS4?

[rmasonjr]

For HS hub users like a Zee (or even a Z-Net), you dont have much of an option for external backup systems.
With BLBackup you at least have something.

I wrote my own shell script to backup that is called from HS each night:

#!/bin/bash
BACKUP_FILE=HS4_`date +%Y%m%d`.tar.gz
cd /home/homeseer
tar -zcvf $BACKUP_FILE /usr/local/HomeSeer
rm -f $(ls -ltr HS4_* |head -n -7)

It keeps the last 7 days of backups

[TC1]

For HS hub users like a Zee (or even a Z-Net), you dont have much of an option for external backup systems.
With BLBackup you at least have something.

Ahh, got it. I was being Windows myopic, my apologies.

[langenet]

Funny, I've added one plugin since my upgrade and it basically added 10K files. I do have 26 plugins installed. BLBack never completes either..

EDIT: I just unchecked the autobackup and deleted the 1.3GB worth of backups in the html/backups folder. It's actually slightly smalled than my HS3 directory now. Did a clean restart and trying the backup again.

[racerfern]

Just comparing notes: My html/backups folder only has small json files and the newest one is from 2/2/23

My HS4 folder has 17055 files. No errors here.

I use both BLBackup and the built-in backup to two separate locations, one local one on a network PC.

[randy]

29,000+ here and 26,000+ are in html. Ten years of use, plug-ins come and go, but none of them seem to clean up after the plug-in is removed. It is amazing file bloat, but it really doesn’t hurt anything other than the time to backup or copy the HS file system. I suppose I should go in and purge, but watching a rerun of M*A*S*H is more important

[langenet]

Well, after 5 hours I had to kill BLBackup again. I am not having any luck with this on HS4. It has been my life saver for 7 years with HS3.
After deleting the html/backups in HS4, the size of the directory went down substantially. Below is what is in my HS4.save (backup taken of the HS4 directory while HS was down in Windows). Note thte size of the zip files... I'm perplexed. The only thing I haven't tried yet was to re-install the plugin.

[langenet]

Well I finally got things sorted out. First of all, after I copied my HS3 folder to HS4 for the upgrade, I forgot to set an exclusion in defender for the HS4 folder. Then the automatic HS4 backups may have been causing issues, so I disabled them and removed all those files - find it kind of redundant if I'm using BLBackup. I tried to rename my HS4 folder to save it during my investigation but something had a handle on the folder despite everything being shutdown. It wasn't until I rebooted, it was cleared. Finally, I deleted the BLBackup.s3db and reinstalled the plugin. Works like a charm in about 7 minutes.

I can now sleep better

[rmasonjr]

Just FYI - I installed the Zigbee Plus plugin and it has over 22k files by itself

[langenet]

That's crazy. I've installed Michael's mcsMQTT to try and know there isn't that many. I wonder why so many files? Don't these two plugins do essentially the same thing?

[rmasonjr]

That's crazy. I've installed Michael's mcsMQTT to try and know there isn't that many. I wonder why so many files?

Node.js requires so many modules to operate...

[TC1]

Node.js requires so many modules to operate...

This. People need to realize that Node.js is based on interpretive JavaScript, the application itself contains hundreds of individual modules/code-snippets which are referenced when needed.

A compiled application would simply combine all those individual modules into one (or more) executable and load everything into memory at run time.

[ewkearns]

Let me offer some software-agnostic thoughts. I recently lost my SSD drive on the HS4 server... so I had to reload everything. Using the cloud "Restore Function" hosted by HST I discovered that the only directories zipped up and saved were:

Config
Data
html
scripts

So, if you have any other personal goodies in any other folder, like Media, etc., it won't be saved. My point being, don't rely on the cloud to save everything you might need. Caveat Emptor.

Designer backup? Well, that's another thread.