Variable backup size

Hello guys,
we are doing gitlab backup every night and we found out that backup files size varies.
Does anybody know why ?

It think the most common reason (and certain the main reason in our case) is build artifacts, if some developer makes a lot of builds of one project that generates huge artifacts, that will (typically) make the backups bigger (until the artifacts expire).

But there are probably other things in a backup that can vary in size, the registry comes to mind.

The only way you can know for sure is to check a couple of your backups. And if you find the variations comes from something you don’t want backed up, you can skip any part, see
https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/raketasks/backup_restore.html#excluding-specific-directories-from-the-backup

(And our backups vary in size between 150GiB and 300GiB)

3 Likes

Thanks. You are correct.
After i modified cron, the backups have about 800MB each time.

Thank you.