Managing your server storage is necessary for preventing service interruptions. Over time, servers accumulate log files, temporary data, and monitoring records that can fill up your disk space.

RunCloud provides three specialized tools to help you reclaim space without affecting your live website data.

1. Clear Logs and Cache

This tool is designed for routine maintenance. It removes temporary system files and log entries that are no longer needed for daily operations. This action is safe to perform on production servers and won’t change your application settings.

What this action removes:

  • All web application access and error logs.
  • System log files located under /var/log/.
  • APT package manager cache files.
  • MySQL binary logs older than 3 days.

How to clear logs and cache:

  1. Navigate to the “Monitoring” tab for your server settings in the RunCloud dashboard and click the options (…) button. In the menu, select “Clear Logs & Cache”.
  2. Read the summary of files to be removed.
  3. Click on the Clean button.

2. Clear Monitoring Data

RunCloud automatically stores monitoring data for 30 days to help you track server performance. If your storage is nearly full, you can manually delete this data before the 30-day expiration period.

Warning: This action is permanent. Once deleted, this historical performance data cannot be recovered.

Available data types to delete:

  • “Top Process”: CPU and memory usage data generated by running processes.
  • “Slow Query”: Database performance logs and records of slow SQL queries.
  • “Storage”: Historical disk usage and storage monitoring statistics.

How to clear monitoring data:

  1. Navigate to the “Monitoring” tab for your server settings in the RunCloud dashboard and click the options (…) button.
  2. In the menu, select “Clear Monitoring Data”.
  3. Use the checkboxes to select the specific data types you wish to remove.
  4. Click on the Clean button.

3. Clear Old Data

This tool synchronizes your server monitoring with your current list of active web applications. It’s particularly useful if you’ve deleted old applications, but their health monitoring data still remains on the disk.

When to use this:

  • When server storage is running low.
  • When you see health data for applications that no longer exist.
  • When you want to refresh the monitoring sync for your current setup.

How to clear old data:

  1. Navigate to the “Monitoring” tab for your server settings in the RunCloud dashboard and click the options (…) button.
  2. In the menu, select “Clear Old Data”.
  3. A prompt will appear asking, “Are you sure you want to continue and clear your server’s old application data?”.
  4. Click Clear Old Data to preserve current application data while removing orphaned health records.

After performing the disk cleanup, you can also read our guide on how to check disk usage on Linux and run automated scripts using bash for loops to delete files in Linux. If that’s not enough, then you can also consider increasing the size of the persistent disk on your cloud VPS.