Enterprise Backups Filling C Drive by Default

[GISOfficer]

Having recently done our first full backup of our Enterprise 10.6.1 environment, yesterday I was surprised to find that the server had maxed out its C drive space.  The culprit was Enterprise backup files in this portal folder:

C:\arcgisportal\backup\walarchive

The files in here just keep being created and created until they take up huge amounts of space - clearing it freed up 16gb.  I gather from talking with local technical support that these are related to incremental backups, which we are not yet doing, but it seems an oversight to me to have Enterprise/portal filling up your critical server's C drive.  I would suggest that there needs to be a solution found to this.  In my view it should not rely on customers finding this problem when the C drive fills up, then having to manually clear several gb of files.

Of course backups are great, and it's great that we're able to do a full or incremental backup and restore our server/portal in case of disaster.  I just think this needs looking at.

[JonathanQuinn]

Once you run the DR tool, the expectation was that you'll be scheduling backups on a regular basis. In order to clear out those logs, you'll need to run the DR tool again to create a new backup, which deletes them:

Common problems and solutions—Portal for ArcGIS (10.6) | Documentation for ArcGIS Enterprise 

There is an enhancement to improve this behavior:

ENH-000123248 Allow users to completely turn off the incremental backup at their discretion

[GISOfficer]

Thanks for the response Jonathan.

This expectation/behaviour should be clearly indicated with an option/requirement to save incremental files on a storage drive or shared folder (as the backups themselves are), when you first run a backup and in order to front-foot the potential storage issue.  I did not see any other warning, so it is left to the "I have a problem" stage to find this out.  I don't think the C drive is always the best place for these files.  No doubt however that they will make incremental backups easier, if that's the route one chooses, so that's a good thing.  Our backups, once I have the opportunity to look at scheduling them (1 FTE for 2 organisations), are likely to be about monthly as our configs won't change very quickly once fully set up, and that's a lot of files to stack up in that folder on a server C drive that has in our case 100gb total space.

I should add this is Windows Server, not Linux, but thanks for the link.

[JonathanQuinn]

Those logs are transaction logs and integral to the internal database used within Portal. You typically won't want a database writing to a share for internal processes, so there won't be an option to store the transaction logs on a share or outside the local file system of the database.

We are working on separate options for the DR tool, one that expects you to run them on a scheduled basis so the transaction logs won't be a problem, (replicating to a standby environment), while the other creates a backup for point-in-time restores, (backup/restore workflow). The latter would not cause the problem with the transaction logs.

The same information applies to Windows:

Common problems and solutions—Portal for ArcGIS (10.6) | Documentation for ArcGIS Enterprise 

[DavidHoy]

@JonathanQuinn 

Happy New Year

has there been any advance on this ability to run full webgisdr backups without the expectation that incrementals will continue to be scheduled afterward?