Posted by JugglingCoder on Wed, Feb 26, 2020 - 12:52am

I like to make regular, incremental backups of a site's database but like to keep these backups as small as possible without any un-needed data. In D7 and backdrop I empty all the cache tables before backup.  Are there any other tables I can empty? Like... bd_watchdog, bd_tempstore?  My database backups, even when using gzip compression are getting quite large, much larger than D7 backups...

Comments

Wed, Feb 26, 2020 - 1:03am by BWPanda (not verified)

This answer has a good list of tables that can be ignored in backups: https://drupal.stackexchange.com/a/171884/16537

Backdrop is obviously slightly different to Drupal, but I think a lot of those tables still exist.

Here's a copy & paste of the list, but do check the link for more explanation/details:

  • accesslog
  • batch
  • all cache related tables, such as:
    • cache*
    • cache_block
    • cache_content
    • cache_filter*
    • cache_form
    • cache_calendar_ical
    • cache_menu*
    • cache_page*
    • cache_views
    • *_cache, such as features_cache or views_data_object_export_cache
  • ctools_views_cache
  • ctools_object_cache
  • devel_queries
  • devel_times
  • flood
  • history
  • queue
  • various search_* tables, such as:
    • search_dataset
    • search_index
    • search_keywords_log
    • search_total
  • semaphore
  • sessions
  • watchdog
  • webform_submitted_data

Thu, Feb 27, 2020 - 6:44am by herb

Some people might not want to delete the webform_submitted_data if it contains data that needs to be saved online.

Thu, Feb 27, 2020 - 7:05pm by JugglingCoder

Thank you both for the tips.  I did empty all tables as BWPanda suggested and it did significantly reduce file size.  Still wondering what the _tempstore table is.