Hi Andy,

As a customer who has been in this position recently (the shame!) I would be happy to allow backups to fail past 100%, and an alert sent to point me at a control panel feature which allows me to crudely admin my backups ie delete one, several or all backups. If you would send a weekly reminder until the problem is resolved, then I couldn't expect you to do very much more.

I don't expect you to have to manually intervene with this service. It's low tech and low cost. And I appreciate the service.

This also sounds reasonably straight forward to implement. It is certainly straight forward to explain in the FAQs.

Thanks,

Duggie

On Monday, December 30, 2013, Nigel Barker wrote:
Hi Andy

Personally I'm send a warn at 80%, a critical at 90% and fail any backups
taking use beyond 100%.

If you could give users the ability to delete either an entire backup, or
all backups of a specific file/directory, then it is their problem.

I'm not personally fond of the idea of billing people whose backups grow
beyond their limit, might require a check of the t&c's they agree to, but
whatever it certainly shouldn't load you with work when a customer uses
more than they've paid for!

Nige

> Hi Rodrigo,
>
> On Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 12:44:59PM -0200, Rodrigo Campos wrote:
>> On Monday, December 30, 2013, Andy Smith wrote:
>> > - Nagios sends warnings when that usage goes above 95%, sends
>> >   critical alerts if it goes above 100%
>>
>>
>> Critical on 100% is maybe too late?
>
> Having just checked it is actually 95% for warning and 99% for
> critical.
>
>> I would say maybe ~90% can be critical, as you are clearly running out
>> of
>> space and won't be able to backup anymore.
>
> That is a fair point although the words "warning" and "critical" are
> at the moment just words used in template text in the alert and
> there is therefore no significance between them except what the
> recipient reads.
>
> Also doubtless different people will consider different percentages
> to be what they want.
>
> There isn't a concept of "running out of space" at the moment - if
> you go above 100% then your backups still work. You just eventually
> get asked by me to pay for more space or have some stuff deleted.
>
> Perhaps it is best if the critical alerts stay at 99% and I allow
> the warning percentage to be configurable.
>
>> Or if the size of the last backup times 7 (like in a week you won't be
>> able
>> to backup anymore) is more than x%, then critical. But maybe is a pita
>> to
>> get the size of the last backup?
>
> It doesn't really work like this as there isn't a concept of "size
> of last backup" - only files that change are backed up, so if you
> had ten 1GB files that did not change since last time then the usage
> would be 10GB even though there are two sets of backups.
>
> If one file changed then both versions would be stored, so the usage
> across both sets of backups would be 11GB. So, there is a
> *differential* of 1GB per backup run, and it is true that I could
> take note of this and compare it to how much space is left then
> guess how many of these backup runs would fit given the same amount
> of diffs every time.
>
> That is really complicated though and I'm not convinced there'd be
> very much value in this compared to just the used percentage.
>
>> If you have the size of the last backup, is it possible to add a check
>> to
>> see if the current backup is X% more than the last one?
>>
>> This seems to me, that I'm totally inexperienced and never dealt with
>> this,
>> that can detect early when something got backed up when it shouldn't?
>
> While possible, these just sound like more alerts that people are not
> going to be very interested in. For those who do use the backups
> service, do you feel that a simple percent used alert isn't good
> enough and you need to know about rates of change?
>
>> But in any case, the most reasonable thing to do for me is to abort the
>> next backups until there is free space.
>
> I'm not sure that is reasonable, and I will explain why below..
>
>> > Note that although "just suspend the customer's backups as soon as
>> > they go past 100%" initially sounds like a good idea, it may not be
>> > as it prevents the customer from removing whatever it was they
>> > backed up that they didn't mean to, i.e. fixing it themselves.
>>
>> Sorry, don't follow you here :-S
>
> The backups are incremental. They aren't just X amount of files
> times Y backup points. It's X amount of files plus the amount of
> changes over a configurable time period that in the default case is
> 6 months but some people have it set to 12 months or more.
>
> The default backup schedule looks like this:
>
> - Once every four hours, keep 6.
> - Once every day, keep 7.
> - Once every week, keep 4.
> - Once every month, keep 6.
>
> This means that (without you contacting support to ask for stuff to
> be deleted out of backups), once a file is backed up, it isn't going
> away for 6 months. Even if you delete it off your disk.
>
> e.g., you create:
>
> /var/tmp/dvd_rip
>
> of 8GB or whatever and it gets backed up, so it's now accessible
> via:
>
> /srv/backups/hourly.0/var/tmp/dvd_rip
>
> Noticing your backup space usage wen> _______________________________________________
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>



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Duggie