If someone says of another that he was "a bit stupid" that other person can still become king. Everyone is "a little stupid" sometimes, right?

With that in mind, I have to confess I've been a bit stupid too. The result was a VPS that ran like clockwork, but incapable of displaying any website. Normally, after a short litany of foul language, you'd restore the most recent backup and then move on. But if you've been "a bit stupid", the grab for the backups usually doesn't make much sense...

OK, enough rambling about it. This is what happened in March 2021: It started to become noticeable that the hard disk of the VPS was occupied for more than 90% and that is never good. Now that VPS was not very spacious from the start. 40 GB of disk space, was enough for now. In order to reduce costs, I have also disabled the standard backup procedure of provider Hetzner. Instead, I installed the timeshift app, which is excellent for making backups. The only drawback of timeshift is that the backups are placed somewhere on a piece of hard disk. That's why that solution is also free... they do get the money through a different channel. At first, I spent a few cents (less than a few euros anyway...) on a piece of extra HD, a volume of 10 GB to be precise. But the original HD kept filling up. At that moment I opted for the solution of setting up a (temporary) second VPS at Hetzner, now one with 80GB of HD space. Thanks to the separate volume of 10GB, I could easily transfer everything from the old VPS to the new one. After that, the old VPS and the extra volume could be removed, because we now had enough disk space, right?

Nope! The HD occupancy also went towards 90% in this setup. Then I decided to uninstall timeshift. Nice and radical, who cares... apt purge timeshift*. That command leads to the question of whether all supporting apps and libs may also be removed. I remembered that all sorts of "stuff" had been installed to support timeshift, and without looking critically at the suggested list, I just had the whole list removed. The result of that choice was ultimately an almost empty VPS, without websites. No more available backups, just an empty shell with almost 80 GB of HD, nice and empty.

In itself all well thought out, but it is a pity that I did not have a backup made first by Virtualmin of all my websites. That in itself can be done quite simply. The last time I had done that was late August or early September 2020, so a while ago...

The litany of foul language was now much longer and... let's say "richer". After cooling off and several deep sighs further, there was only one way to go. Completely reinstalled the VPS, with Ubuntu 20:04 LTS. Then put Virtualmin on it and retrieved the September 2020 backup step by step. The funny thing is that now the HD is much less heavily loaded. And that means that the flooding was a result of the recent update of Ubuntu. I didn't put the latest version on a clean system, but as an upgrade from version 18:04 and apparently, that leaves a lot of old junk. It's much less noticeable on my home server because I just have so much disk space here that a 20 or 40 GB loss isn't really noticeable.

All in all, this whole thing is an important and useful lesson. In my new setup on a clean-installed system, I will occasionally make backups in Virtualmin and download them to my home server. A backup of the OS is not really necessary, because I can install everything again.

The problem remains that I have lost several months of work on the various websites. But there is a solution for that too: Google Cache. I was able to recover many of the lost pages. It's not perfect, but that's what you get for being "a little bit stupid".