I utilize podman on my server for running my software.
Recently, I saw that my server ran out of space on its 8TB raid 10 array. Which immediately raised questions for me.
After using “duc” to analyze my drive. I found that podman had used 4 TB of storage space in “/var/tmp”.
Anyone else have this happen to them?
I just deleted ~1TB of cached intermediate container images today
It prompted me to just fresh install my os, which I’m doing right now.
Wait…wha?
What prompted you to reinstall your ENTIRE OS? That should almost never be necessary under any circumstances.
I’m still on-boarding to Linux, and I was on bazzite but a bunch of settings were messed up.
I migrated from docker to podman and for some reason half my flatpaks broke. Then my podman caches were insane, so my disk was filling up. And I had so e messed up settings, like sleep wasn’t working properly and would just show a black screen on resume.
OHHH…you didn’t get an actual on screen prompt, you just decided to reinstall. My bad.
Yes, I just wasn’t happy with the state of my machine. It felt like there were too many parts I didn’t understand, so I wanted to clear it all out and simplify systems.
New to Linux, what’s the fresh install process like? I understand the actual installation, but curious about the workflow of backing up, reconfiguring, etc.
The process of backing up is a matter of preference. Several solutions exist from vendors to freeware.
Lots of people use ‘cp’ or ‘rsync’. I use those prior to borg backups of major repos or archive folders.
Install process is easy. Aside from hypervisors and stuff like that, I just install my OS on bare metal partition, and create a sidecar OS to do maintainance from chroot
Almost everything you care about should be in /home so back that up. Many people keep it on a separate partition or drive to make changing distros (or reinstalling the existing one) easier.
Most of your system config is in /etc so you may want to make a copy of that too.
But the proper process on Linux is not to re-install. It should not be necessary.
On top of this, part of the reasons to use containers is that you can create and destroy them at will while leaving your host tidy and stable. I use Distrobox quite a bit for this reason.