PSA: exclude /var/lib/tor/diff-cache/ from your backups
Hello, Turns out that dir is highly variable, and judging from the name, also disposable. In my case it was responsible for about 20 GB of churn over a month, i.e. it took 25 GB to keep incremental backups of two Tor nodes with only 2 GB each in root FS (and I was wondering what's going on with my backup location's free space...) Dear Tor project: this is very bad style to keep that in /var/lib, content with properties like this must go into /var/cache/ [1], where it would be automatically excluded from backups by default policies in most backup systems. [1] http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#VARCACHEAPPLICATIONCACHEDATA -- With respect, Roman
Hi, On 14/11/17 05:03, Roman Mamedov wrote:
Dear Tor project: this is very bad style to keep that in /var/lib, content with properties like this must go into /var/cache/ [1], where it would be automatically excluded from backups by default policies in most backup systems.
It does seem that all paths used by tor are relative to DataDirectory, which has usually been /var/lib/tor. Perhaps a new configuration option for CacheDirectory, and moving caches to that directory, would be useful. It would be up to packagers to actually use that option though, a default of using DataDirectory as CacheDirectory would not be entirely unreasonable for cases where tor is embedded in other software. This would seem worthy of a trac ticket if someone could write one up. Thanks, Iain.
On 14 Nov 2017, at 20:37, Iain R. Learmonth <irl@torproject.org> wrote:
Hi,
On 14/11/17 05:03, Roman Mamedov wrote: Dear Tor project: this is very bad style to keep that in /var/lib, content with properties like this must go into /var/cache/ [1], where it would be automatically excluded from backups by default policies in most backup systems.
It does seem that all paths used by tor are relative to DataDirectory, which has usually been /var/lib/tor. Perhaps a new configuration option for CacheDirectory, and moving caches to that directory, would be useful. It would be up to packagers to actually use that option though, a default of using DataDirectory as CacheDirectory would not be entirely unreasonable for cases where tor is embedded in other software.
This would seem worthy of a trac ticket if someone could write one up.
Done: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/24272#ticket I'm surprised this hasn't come up before: the existing consensus and directory documents are 10MB+, and change every hour. I guess disks are big nowadays… Also, your relay will survive if you set DataDirectory to /var/cache. But it will lose its keys every time /var/cache is cleared, which some distributions do on restart. (This means it will take some time to attract bandwidth and flags after a restart.) T
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