Post #2817439

2026-02-21 16:19 UTC

@kostyn@niagara.social Uh, why do you have 1.6TB of media storage for six users? Did you not set up media expiry, or with excessive thresholds? Except if you're consuming a lot of relays or something, media cache should be below 100GB for an instance of that size. In general, you can just throw away everything below public/system/cache/ when moving an instance - that's all external media that can be re-fetched from elsewhere on demand.

Replies (1)

@galaxis@mastodon.infra.de 2026-02-21 16:30

@kostyn@niagara.social I moved my personal instance several times... It's a relatively lean process... Lower DNS TTLs for your domain some time in advance, create a new Mastodon setup from scratch on the destination (without starting any of the services), copy over your .env.production, pre-sync media files with rsync (or some s3 tool if you're using that), shut down the origin, change DNS entries, export the database (export gets compressed and is smaller than the live DB), do a final sync of media files, copy over redis data and your DB export, import DB in the destination, start everything up, done. If you're using Elasticsearch, you can just re-deploy the search index via tootctl. Don't forget to raise DNS TTLs when everything is stable. (From memory, might have forgotten some details, but I can probably find my migration notes.)

Open ##2817440