Akeeba Backup creates huge file

[budrys]

Hello.

My Akeeba Backup creates huge file.
How to figure out what could is wrong?

[AMurray]

I don't know what you consider to be huge, but can you come back with an example of what your backup file size(s) are?

In any case, a couple of suggestions - are you using (a) the ZIP format or (b) JPA format for the backup files?

Are you excluding the output directory (where the backups are stored) so you're not actually backing up any previous backups?! This might be a common oversight since the default location of the backup folder is like that below, in most system installations.

Code: Select all

/administrator/components/akeeba/backup

.
You can exclude that folder from your backups (choose the "exclude directories" option) or you can change the location of your output directory to somewhere even outside the site's folder, to another folder on your server, or even outside the "root" folder (on your hosting), and Akeeba even recommends you do that.

Also you can choose to exclude certain database tables if they are not needed (for example an extension you uninstalled left behind some db tables, you can exclude them from the backup).

Can you give us an idea how big the entire site is (in Windows, click on the site's folder, and select "Properties", the properties dialogue opens and gives you an approximate size of all files / folders combined.

If you have a lot of photos, video, audio content that would explain elevated backup size, since those can be quite large files.

Also, depending on what you have in the way of extensions, and content stored in the database - even a few hundred or thousand articles could make the site quite large.

If you don't want one large backup file you can do it in 'part' files,and you choose the 'part' size in MB in the configuration options. I am guessing your trouble is it takes forever to upload (or download) the large file if you're downloading to store it offline, or to upload for restoring a site (or takes a while to extract when restoring due to its size)?