Exercise caution…
Published 2.13.2006 by ~mattg
When modifying backup scripts. Last week (Friday night, I believe), I uninstalled DotProject from my server, as I was not using it and was in need of a bug tracker, not a project manager. My backup script was backing up the DotProject SQL and files along with my normal backups. So I went in and quickly commented out all references to the dotProject portions of the backup script.
At least, I thought it was all references. I missed the part where it created a tarball for the directory. But since I removed the directory, it ended up creating a tarball of / (yes, that’s right, root). The tarball was so large it ate all the free space on my harddrive in under 2 backups.
How was I alerted to this error? Well, I hadn’t received any email through that server, so I checked it out. I wasn’t able to do anything… no creating temp files (which killed a few services), could check my email, nothing.
So I deleted those huge backups and now everything is running normally. That’ll teach me for quickly editing important files.
Filed under Linux
