Is it safe to remove these files?

Webmin
1
SYSTEM INFORMATION
OS type and version Ubuntu 22.04
Webmin version 2.202

in the directory

/var/webmin/diffs

I have over 1GB of files on one server & 600mb on another, looking at the contents of these files it appears to be recording exec commands the webmin/virtualmin makes (scheduled backups etc). Can I safely delete these files to reclaim the disk space ?

1 Like
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Yeah, those are for tracking changes. If you don’t care about the past, you can delete them.

You can also make Webmin automatically delete them more aggressively in:

Webmin->Webmin Configuration->Logging->Periodically clear log files?

2 Likes
3

Thanks! - that saved a ton of space that I couldn’t understand had been gradually vanishing for years

4

That works for the log files but the diffs directory has not shrunk, in fact it has increased in size, time to manually delete it

find /var/webmin/diffs/* -type d -ctime +10 -exec rm -rf {} \;

does the trick if anyone needs it

1 Like
5

This has got me digging around for other files that are consuming space.

I have found another set the proftpd.log which is happily being log rotated, but the sftp.log which is over 15GiB and doesn’t seem to be rotated

6

webmin->system->log file rotation add new file should allow you to add sftp.log to the rotation schedule

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try looking in

/var/webmin/locks

that is full of symlinks to files that no longer exist, one of my servers has 9.8 mb of symlinks considering that a symlink consumes <100 b thats an awful lot of dead symlinks, most of which seem to be linked to the real time monitoring function

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Interesting. Mine is empty. Should I be worried? *asking for a friend*

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I’m guessing, if you don’t use system monitors you won’t get anything in the directory