Frequently Asked Questions¶
Why does data.ms appear to be 2TB?¶
Tunarr uses Meilisearch for search functionality. Meilisearch creates a file called data.ms in the Tunarr configuration directory that may appear to be approximately 2TB in size. This file is NOT actually taking up 2TB of disk space.
The data.ms file is a sparse file, which means it only allocates disk blocks for data that has actually been written. The reported size is the virtual size, while the actual disk usage is typically only a few megabytes.
You can verify the actual disk usage with:
# Linux/macOS - shows actual blocks used
du -h /path/to/tunarr/.tunarr/data.ms
# Compare with apparent size
ls -lh /path/to/tunarr/.tunarr/data.ms
Excluding data.ms from backups¶
Since data.ms is a sparse file that can be regenerated by Meilisearch, you may want to exclude it from manual backups to avoid issues with backup tools that don't handle sparse files well.
rsync:
tar (with sparse file support):
# Use --sparse flag to handle sparse files efficiently
tar --sparse -cvf backup.tar /path/to/tunarr/.tunarr/
# Or exclude it entirely
tar --exclude='data.ms' -cvf backup.tar /path/to/tunarr/.tunarr/
Duplicati:
Add data.ms to your exclusion filters in the backup configuration.
Borg Backup:
restic:
Tip
The Meilisearch index can be rebuilt automatically by Tunarr, so excluding data.ms from backups is generally safe, so long as the ms-snapshots directory is preserved. After restoring a backup without this file, Tunarr will recreate the search index on startup.