Family Historian User Group

I've just noticed that my full backup has grown to 500Mb!!!, and don't know why, as I don't store any media in FH, haven't changed anything in my settings, and certainly haven't changed my way of working.

I did a quick check for historical size of the backups and found the following:
It grew from 83 - 90 Mbytes between 13th May to 4th Dec 2022
Then it grew from 350-383 Mbytes between 19th and 22nd Dec 2022
Then grew from 499-500 Mbytes between 5th Jan to 15th Feb 2023

I noticed during the latest backup that FH added 3817 files to the backup - Eh, where do they come from? Any way to see what they are?

Anyone have any idea what is going on?
NB I am currently running V7-0-18

I've separated this from the topic you replied to as it is quite a different issue.

CP/FH have made it more difficult to inspect inside the Backup file by changing it from a Compressed (zipped) folder .ZIP file to a Family Historian Backup .FHBAK file.

If you have 7-Zip installed, then right-click the Family Historian Backup file and choose 7-Zip > Open archive.
In the 7-Zip window choose View and tick Flat View to list all folders and files.

If not, then you can change the file type from .FHBAK to .ZIP
Then you can right-click the file and choose Open in new window which allows all the internal folders and files to be navigated as if they were not inside the backup.

I wonder if you have an excessive number of Snapshot files which should get regularly purged to just a handful but the FH mechanism sometimes fails and they just keep accumulating with each one the size of your GEDCOM file.
Use File > Backup/Restore > Revert to Snapshot... and check if more than a dozen Snapshots are listed.
If so then Delete the oldest ones from the top of the list and then Close the window.

Whoops, I thought I had clicked New Topic, my bad.
I’ll give your suggestions a try, and report back

BTW, is this a recent change re snapshots? As I stated, I haven’t changed anything, so why is it happening now?

Sometimes the FH process for automatically purging old Snapshots appears to misbehave and then it seems to stop deleting old Snapshots altogether. It is a bug that is difficult to reliably reproduce so very difficult to fix.

Since a Snapshot file can be created every day if you use FH every day they can grow quite quickly.

I have added Unusual number of Snapshot files as an Exception Report to the Show Project Statistics plugin.

Following the advice from Miketate, my problem is now sorted - size of backups backdown to 61Mbyte

For information
1. All Webites are created in the Packages folder within the project, so will get added to every Full backup!
2. Every chart saved as a PDF, is saved to Public folder within the project, so these are also added to every Full backup

My Suggestions:
Once you have created a website, move all the files to another folder on your PC, don't leave it in your project folder, to be included in your full backups! Don't forget to do this every time you re-create your website

Once you have create a PDF of Any Diagrams, move it into another folder on your PC, don't leave it in your project folder, to be included in your full backups! These were BIG files that accounted for most of the 600MBytes of the backups

Remember though that the FH backups are really only for users who don’t otherwise backup their personal folders. If you do, you don’t need to run them at all, and your FH data are backed up along with all your other stuff.

Mark1834 wrote: ↑

16 Feb 2023 16:54

Remember though that the FH backups are really only for users who don’t otherwise backup their personal folders. If you do, you don’t need to run them at all, and your FH data are backed up along with all your other stuff.

Don’t they also provide time-stamped rollback opportunities?

Those are good points Mike.

The PDF files, etc, in the Public folder, can be excluded from Backups by choosing the Medium Backup option.

However, the Web/CD/DVD Packages will still be included in Medium Backups.
I think the Help advice for Packages is that they should be moved out of the Project for Web upload or CD/DVD burning.

Tony Jones wrote: ↑

16 Feb 2023 16:57

Mark1834 wrote: ↑

16 Feb 2023 16:54

Remember though that the FH backups are really only for users who don’t otherwise backup their personal folders. If you do, you don’t need to run them at all, and your FH data are backed up along with all your other stuff.

Don’t they also provide time-stamped rollback opportunities?

Those are Snapshots automatically created by FH regardless of backups
File>Backup/Restore>Revert to Snapshot... is where you find them, unless you turned that off in Tools>Preferences>File Load/Save>Automatic snapshot management

Neil, this thread is NOT discussing Snapshots. It is discussing Medium & Full Backups and independent Windows backups.

For a thread not discussing Snapshots, Mike, you introduced them in your first response...

tatewise wrote: ↑

16 Feb 2023 18:02

Neil, this thread is NOT discussing Snapshots. It is discussing Medium & Full Backups and independent Windows backups.

I know that. I was correcting Tony who mentioned that backups aided with time stamped roll backs (snapshots), so I see my response as relevant.

ColeValleyGirl wrote: ↑

16 Feb 2023 18:04

For a thread not discussing Snapshots, Mike, you introduced them in your first response...

Only because I know they can cause inflated Project Backup sizes, which is the topic.

neil40 wrote: ↑

16 Feb 2023 18:07

tatewise wrote: ↑

16 Feb 2023 18:02

Neil, this thread is NOT discussing Snapshots. It is discussing Medium & Full Backups and independent Windows backups.

I know that. I was correcting Tony who mentioned that backups aided with time stamped roll backs (snapshots), so I see my response as relevant.

IMO Tony was talking about Project Backups that are time-stamped, so you can roll back the whole Project (not just GEDCOM) to some past point in time that may not be available with independent Windows backups.

tatewise wrote: ↑

16 Feb 2023 18:24

neil40 wrote: ↑

16 Feb 2023 18:07

tatewise wrote: ↑

16 Feb 2023 18:02

Neil, this thread is NOT discussing Snapshots. It is discussing Medium & Full Backups and independent Windows backups.

I know that. I was correcting Tony who mentioned that backups aided with time stamped roll backs (snapshots), so I see my response as relevant.

IMO Tony was talking about Project Backups that are time-stamped, so you can roll back the whole Project (not just the GEDCOM) to some past point in time that may not be available with independent Windows backups.

It’s a matter of interpretation. We interpreted it differently.

Actually it wasn’t discussing medium backups until several posts in, but I suspect most of these recent posts will be deleted as another silly FHUG squabble that doesn’t get us anywhere and certainly doesn’t have any long term value...