Hi guys! I think I’m over Joplin. Don’t get me wrong, it’s simple, it works, but… why is it Postgres db…. I have the server on a small box with like 250 GB of space and backing it up with kopia to Backblaze with free 10 GB, so I’m a bit storage cautious.

With each snapshot, it seems like a good chunk of the database changes, even when I don’t use Joplin that day. That results in kopia backing up those changed files, and backups keep growing. Right now the Joplin database is like 200Mb, BUT when I export the notes from the app… all of them weigh 2Mb… including images. Yes there is versioning of notes, but they shouldn’t be that big after one-two months lol.

I know I know, I’m being a bit weird about it, but I’m getting daily notifications about backups and I see how they grow each day.

Anyway, do you have any alternatives that have an app on iOS and on Linux? Or should I just use Apple Notes in the browser? Thanks

EDIT: The answer was easier than I thought. Just don’t back it up, it’s synced which means each device has a copy of it anyway so there is not really need for it, thanks @vvv@programming.dev !

  • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    2·
    10 months ago

    I think you need to learn more about how databases work. They don’t typically reclaim deleted space automatically for performance reasons. Databases like to write to a single large file they can then index into. Re-writing those files is expensive so left to the DBA (you) to determine when it should be done.

    And how are you backing up the database? Just backing up /var/lib/postgres? Or are you doing a pg_dump? If the former then it’s possible your backups won’t be coherent if you haven’t stopped your database and it will contain that full history of deleted stuff. pg_dump would give you just the current data in a way that will apply properly to a new database should you need to restore

    You can also consider your backup retention policy. How many backups do you need for how long?

    • seang96@spgrn.comEnglish
      2·
      10 months ago

      Setup backup hooks with velero and kopia on a HA postres cluster this week. Biggest DB is Lemmy and that shrinks by a factor of 10 using pgdunp with custom archive. Dumping is 100% the way to go!

      Similarly I should do this for my sqlite applications, it looks like kopia can’t do incremental backups with them and thinking about it, it makes sebse, likely sane reasons you mentioned.