Huge number of files on disk

F

fenderman

Registered
Can anyone help with this - we run Retrospect backup to do client backups overnight. We do full recycle backups so we always have room on the tapes, and we've found it better to back up all files rather than being selective (clients leave files all over the place, and sometimes having system file backups has been really useful, so we take the lot).

Overall I'm quite happy with the performance and we get most clients backed up every night - however, the number of files on some OSX clients just seems to keep growing. Some are up to 170,000 files. My theory is that system upgrades may be the cause of this - with hard drive space being plentiful, is the system hanging on to redundant files rather than trashing them and freeing up the space?

All OSX clients leave their machines on constantly, so the OS has time to do it's housekeeping in terms of clearing out caches and other routine stuff.

Does anyone have any ideas on this, and if so could the number of files be safely reduced? We run OSX 10.3.x mostly, on a 100 baseT LAN.
 
fenderman said:
Can anyone help with this - we run Retrospect backup to do client backups overnight. We do full recycle backups so we always have room on the tapes, and we've found it better to back up all files rather than being selective (clients leave files all over the place, and sometimes having system file backups has been really useful, so we take the lot).

Overall I'm quite happy with the performance and we get most clients backed up every night - however, the number of files on some OSX clients just seems to keep growing. Some are up to 170,000 files. My theory is that system upgrades may be the cause of this - with hard drive space being plentiful, is the system hanging on to redundant files rather than trashing them and freeing up the space?

All OSX clients leave their machines on constantly, so the OS has time to do it's housekeeping in terms of clearing out caches and other routine stuff.

Does anyone have any ideas on this, and if so could the number of files be safely reduced? We run OSX 10.3.x mostly, on a 100 baseT LAN.
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170,000 files seems about normal! I manage some servers with 500,000 files. OS X is a very complex OS, so don't waste your time trying to get rid of the files.
 
Hi sourcehound, thanks for your views on this. I don't want to break anything or waste my time trashing files if this is about what you would expect for a normal OSX machine - it's just that some of our Macs are considerably lower, around the 100,000 mark, and work files won't explain the difference.
 
Greetings,

You might be seeing the log files grow - you can try Onyx or other utilities to help manage your log.gz files ( the archive of the logs) The other thing is web related files - cache etc. You might have to set up some kind of maintenance to manage those.
 
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