Re: [tor-relays] PSA: exclude /var/lib/tor/diff-cache/ from your backups

[teor]

> On 14 Nov 2017, at 20:37, Iain R. Learmonth  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.)

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Re: [tor-relays] PSA: exclude /var/lib/tor/diff-cache/ from your backups

[Iain R. Learmonth]

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.



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[tor-relays] PSA: exclude /var/lib/tor/diff-cache/ from your backups

[Roman Mamedov]

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
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