[Gitlab-CE] Is it safe to delete the content of backups folder?

Hello everyone,

I work for a small company (we don’t have sysadmin and I take this role when it is needed but this is not my job), and we are encountering a serrious issue on our Gitlab CE server.

I wanted to create a backup with the command
sudo gitlab-rake gitlab:backup:create

However this made gitlab to stop working. After investigation I found that when running df -h, the /dev/root has only 20G and is totally full. We have a /dev/sda3 with 1.7T nearly empty.

Gitlab CE was not installed by me. Correct me if I am wrong but I suppose that gitlab-ce was installed as root where it should be installed with a user under home.

However I am trying to solve this issue with the installation as it is actually because we cannot access our gitlab. I found that the folder /var/opt/gitlab/backups uses 11G (we have a lot of repositories).

My critical question is can I safely delete the content of this foler or at least the content of backups/repositories, for temporarily free some space, and make a clean backup after it by another way. Is deleting the content of this folder will not affect any gitlab data or git repository?

Thank you very much.

A friend suggested me to move the folder to /home/me , I did it and after a reboot it works fine.

However would it be a good idea to move the gitlab installation to /home?
How could I make a backup of the current gitlab installation in root but with creating all files somewhere else (in /home)?