OS X Server 5 disk is running full in a few hours

I stopped it.

Remove it completely and see whether the problem goes away.

Hmm... I don't see a /Library/Server/ServerDocs directory here, but then I'm still running Yosemite. I also don't have a ~/Library/Server directory. So I'm wondering where this "ServerDocs" directory came from.

I have used EyeTV in the past, and know EyeTV recordings do use the .eyetv filename extension. So it seems like those files would be coming from EyeTV. Do you perhaps have EyeTV configured to store videos on a shared volume on the same machine as OS X Server?

I did a fresh install On a fresh formatted disk. No Eyetv on that server. I also stopped all other Mac's in my network. These files still growing until the disk is full.

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I've the same problem here. My server running on a Mac mini with a 128Go SSD, Full in few hours. The "serverdocs" folder is 105Go.

I've strange files see pictures.

Hi there,

i have exactly the same problem. I have updated my mac mini late 2012 to el capitan without any problems. Installed the new OSX Server 5.0. And Now the folder /Library/Server/ServerDocs/Data uses massive ammount of disk space until the system drive is full. It is going to spam my disk with useless trash. In my case 660GB Data. Mainly .plist files and some .png files. I think it is not a feature, it is a bug.

My solution until now is to end the network sharing in the file server. If you have no shares present or you have disabled the filesharing service, the folder does not get full with this trash. Just disabling IOS sharing: no change. This does not function, the folder gets bigger and bigger every minute. Clean new install of System and server: no change.

I am really pleased, if someone may give a hint or solution.

I have not seen this problem, but when I have mysterious files being written I find the iosnoop tool can be useful in finding out who's writing them.

sudo iosnoop -m /

This command causes the isotope tool to report, in real time, every read, write, open, close, create, move and so on that occurs on the boot filesystem. It can be lot of data, but just let it run for a little bit and then press Control+C to stop the tool.

Find a few records that refer to your mystery files; you can use the Find command in the Terminal window. On each line, iosnoop will report the name of the process that performed that operation. That's where the files are coming from. (Note that if the process turned out to be smbd, or something like that, then the culprit is probably a file sharing client.)

Hi, Thanks for your answer. The writing process is "sdmd". May be i write an automator skript, which deletes the Folder Data every hour. So i can use the file sharing service. Or I use Samba SMB for sharing, like with OSX 10.9.

Greetings,

As long as no other documentation is provided by Apple, the solution is to deactivate the "ServerDocs" feature by entering the command

sudo serveradmin stop documents

after each installation of an updated copy of OS X Server.

Folks,

Need to add my voice to this thread with the same experience on OS X Server 5.015. Just like for others above, my Data folder in the ServerDocs is quickly filling up with mostly PNG files. However, in my case I'm recognizing them as converted jpgs of my own! They probably come from my Photos library somewhere on the Mac that's running the server. Really creepy!

This must be coming from the same Mac because in the server's File Sharing settings it shows 0 connected users. Also, noticed that if I turn File Sharing off, the visibly ongoing addition of PNGs stops. If I turn it back on, with a little delay it resumes.The really weird thing is that I have the same version server running on two other Macs that I oversee and the Data folder remains totally empty!

I tried running sudo iosnoop -m / as James above suggested, but Terminal says it can't run it as I don't have sudo permissions... Also weird, it's my admin account...

This is really disturbing and we need to get to the bottom of this. Look forward to new thoughts, suggestions...

Thanks!

Update:

Did some experimenting and seems like the unwanted files in the Data folder of ServerDocs begin accumulating as soon as "iOS" sharing is checked in the protocol section for each share. If even one of the shares has that on, accumulation will start. As soon as "iOS" is turned off for all shares, it stops. Having WebDav on or off makes no difference.

Can someone please replicate this?

I have the same issue with thousands (100,853) png's being created in that folder. But the pictures aren't mine!!! They seem to be being pulled from archived file backups on another had drive on the computer.

Can i delete them without affecting the integrity of the original files?

Also how do they get there like the above I did have iOS sharing turned on?

If it is because of iOS sharing I would assume it is making smaller quicker loading versions of all files being shared, but the is just a guess!

Yes, you're right. If iOS sharing is enabled on a shared folder, the sdmd process will index files in that shared folder for sharing to iOS. Disabling iOS sharing on all shared folders will stop new files from being generated in this folder.

Disabling iOS sharing on all shared folders has the same result as the solution mbresink suggested of running "sudo serveradmin stop documents". Stopping the service directly using the serveradmin command line tool will help, but only temporarily since the documents service will be restarted if and when modifications are made to shared folders in Server.app.

You can confirm that the documents service is off by opening Terminal and running:

sudo serveradmin status documents

And verifying the returned state is "STOPPED".

While my disk wasn't filling up, I was experiencing the same issue with the creation of many files when turning on iOS sharing. While I'm not experiencing your disk space issues, I was concerned and did a little digging and thought I would share what I found.

From what I can tell, it looks like the server is creating a set of image files for each file in the shared directory to use when an iOS device is browsing the file directory. With the image files it is clearly true that the files created in /Library/Server/ServerDocs/ are smaller, thumbnail versions of actual images stored in my shared directory. This created thousands of image files, but none of them is very large and space consumption isn't a problem on the server drive in my case. I don't have any other media file types (eyetv, video files, etc.) in my shared directory so I can't compare file sizes on the copies to originals for those types of formats. Perhaps the server is creating small-format versions of the video content for preview on iOS devices, or some similar use, but this has a larger impact on disk space since the original video files are much larger to begin with. Just something for someone else to look into.