Thanks for the reply, Ken.
Sorry about missing the context info. I'm relatively new to Moodle-specific admin nuances...
Moodle 2.6.4+
Exp.Backup - On; didn't change behavior
PHP ini resource settings:
Mem: 128M
Parse & Exec times: 60sec
Ubuntu server 12.4
Linux ##### 3.2.0-57-generic #87-Ubuntu SMP Tue Nov 12 21:35:10 UTC 2013 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
Course Backup path is a mount:
//########/Backups/#### on /media/offsite type cifs (rw) ---- (this is a Win Server 2008R2 share)
Auto Course backup enabled for 6pm daily, to /media/offsite/moodle_course_backup, keeping 2, etc.
Also run a manual nightly full system backup in a cron job for DR site, and VM backups, but the course backups are nice for when a prof blows up a course - so easy to recover versus full system backups.
So, let's see if I follow you (and in case anyone else is seeing this issue they'd know what I did):
One suggestion is that I set a symlink between the temp/backup folder and an external big disk? I'm not sure I follow how that fixes the problem. I've got courses over 4GB (some almost 30GB - need to have my instr.tech.guy sort that out with them!) which wasn't a big problem in 2.4; those course backups would fail but get flagged in the report and I'd know we need to work with the faculty on those, but least the other courses would still complete, and clean-up would wipe the temp, including the files from the failed backups. So even a huge external disk now (2.6) slowly fills (60GB of failed backup at a time). Likely I'm missing something in understanding this one?
Another suggestion was to ditch auto-backups for manual variant - principally to avoid peak times, etc. Worth looking at the script, perhaps, to see if I could check course size first, and skip the big ones, but still doesn't answer why the failed course files aren't cleaned up.
Am I getting that? What am I missing about why those failed course files aren't cleaned up? What I did today, finding that the exp.backups setting didn't help, was add a line in my nightly routine to wipe the temp/backup folder. Doesn't get my large course backups running, but at least the disks don't fill up.
I'll post any other solution I find here as well. Thanks for working at this with me.