A hint on backups - Nepomuk wasting space

[doktor5000]

I just spent the whole morning debugging a problem that I thought was in my backup script. Seems that the drive I use to hold backups of /home was full, even though I had just cleaned it out a couple of weeks ago.

Every daily backup was taking something like 20 GB of NEW hard drive space - and I can assure you that I don't make that many changes in my home directory over the course of a day. At 20 GB per day, it wasn't taking long to fill my 230 GB partition, especially since there are 2 virtual machines that live on that partition as well.

So, I hunted for the problem. And I hunted. And I hunted.

And I found it.

Nepomuk.

Seems that my semantic search database has achieved the status of nearly 20 GB of space on my /home partition. This for a system that doesn't even work reliably.

The file ~/.kde4/share/apps/nepomuk/repository/main/data/virtuosobackend/soprano-virtuoso.db is a paltry 19415433216 bytes in size. And, of course, it does change every day...sometimes substantially on those days where virtuoso actually decides to run reliably. So the whole thing gets copied every night.

So I excluded the directory ~/.kde4/share/apps/nepomuk from the backup, and went through the backup directory and deleted that directory from every backup, and now I have 163 GB available on that partition.

A 20GB nepomuk file. There's something obscene about that. But it is something to know about; your backups will go a lot better if you exclude that file.

[filip]

Very similar to one of my experiences with akonadi database .

[doktor5000]

Well, if you don't use it, then simply disable Nepomuk, Strigi and if you don't use any of the KDE PIM suite, also disable Akonadi.
Disabling Akonadi properly is a bit tricky, but not difficult. If you want to know how, just shoot, I'd add it then to https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Speeding_up_ ... _Resources

[doktor5000]

Apart from that, for backups which include KDE settings I've grown the habit to only backup the stuff that I'm really sure
which is reusable safely and doesn't bring any funny effects into play. I'd never backup all KDE settings and data and reuse that,
just causes too many small problems. Learned that over various years of KDE updates/distro upgrades and countless support threads.

[filip]

Disabling Akonadi properly is a bit tricky, but not difficult. If you want to know how, just shoot, I'd add it then to https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Speeding_up_ ... _Resources

Thx doktor5000. But I'm puzzled now. Instructions are there already .

[jiml8]

I make heavy use of kmail, so killing akonadi isn't possible...though when I was using Mageia 2 I was actually looking into migrating off kmail to get away from that nightmare. It works a lot better in Mageia 3 though.

Also, I need to search. Which means my choice is nepomuk or manual scripts these days. So I nurse nepomuk along and keep hoping it will improve in Mageia 4.

I actually do save a lot of the KDE settings, and on many occasions I have had to restore those settings. Crossing versions is likely to get you into trouble, but it makes things a lot simpler to restore (if done carefully) from backed up settings within the same version of KDE. I was quite surprised to find a 20 GB nepomuk file though...wasn't looking at that at all...thought the problem was something going wrong with rsync.

[doktor5000]

Disabling Akonadi properly is a bit tricky, but not difficult. If you want to know how, just shoot, I'd add it then to https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Speeding_up_ ... _Resources

Thx doktor5000. But I'm puzzled now. Instructions are there already .

That's pretty much a brute-force way, can be done cleaner. Must have written that when I was frustrated and went for a quick-and-dirty fix

What you basically want is to set the Akonadi server to prevent from autostart like explained here: http://userbase.kde.org/Akonadi#Disabli ... _subsystem Then afterwards disable the krunner (Alt+F2 -> click wrench) plugins for everything that uses PIM informations (mainly contacts and calendar events). Then right-click on the clock next to systray -> settings for digital clock -> calendar -> disable show events.