Help! I’m not able to login to my site due to insufficient disk space (after creating backup)

Troubleshooting steps

• Upgrade your disk space plan from your hosting account if you can. It’s because your site obviously needs some extra disk space due to the size or needs. So it pays off if you upgrade disk space so your site can continue working properly. Once disk space is increased by your host – you should be able to access your site and WP-admin immediately which makes the rest of the troubleshooting below easier.

•  Start deleting some unused large files from your site (not necessarily Prime Mover packages or files). These files might be left from some very old backup (from another plugin, etc.) that is never used at all. So it might be good to check if these files exist and delete it via FTP.

•  Next thing to do is to manually keep a copy of all your Prime Mover backups in your local computer. You can do this via FTP by navigating to  (if your site is single-site) /wp-content/uploads/prime-mover-export-files/1/  or (/wp-content/uploads/prime-mover-export-files/{blog_id}/ if multisite)

• Find all files with WPRIME extension and download it to your Desktop. This way you have extra backups in your local Desktop computer without worrying that you might accidentally delete these backups in your site.  If you want to further protect these backups – you can even put them in Cloud storage like Google Drive or Dropbox so there are multiple copies of backups.

• [OPTIONAL] – if your site is multisite with backups in different subsites, you can find backup folders for each subsite, e.g. for subsite with blog ID: 2 and so forth, it will look like /wp-content/uploads/prime-mover-export-files/2/ OR ( /wp-content/uploads/prime-mover-export-files/{blog_id}/-replace {blog_id} with your subsite blog ID). Manually download these backups as well if it exists. Repeat the process until all backups are downloaded to your local Desktop.

•  Now if you want to delete some Prime Mover files in your site, you can start deleting the temporary files. Go back to /wp-content/uploads/prime-mover-export-files/1/ or (/wp-content/uploads/prime-mover-export-files/{blog_id}/ if multisite) and delete all folders. Do not delete files with WPRIME extension. Folders are temporary – it should not exist and can be deleted. But you should not delete any WPRIME extension using FTP.

• Check if you are now able to access your site and wp-admin. If it’s still not working. Start deleting with your old Prime Mover backups until you are able to regain your WP-admin access.

• Once you are able to login to your wp-admin, go to Prime Mover -> Packages. Click “Refresh Packages“. If there is an error on corrupt packages, manually delete these packages via your FTP.

• Once all packages are shown without any corrupt packages – these are your clean backups. You can manually delete very old backups to further free up some disk space.

Tips and suggestions

• You should always upgrade to higher disk space plan (from your hosting account) to fit your website needs and avoid this issue in the future.
• Whenever you export site (even to your Downloads local folder) – it will use some disk space because Prime Mover will archive files (plugins, media files, database etc.) into a WPRIME package.
• To reduce size of the exported package – you can export only database. This is typically true if you don’t change the media files, plugins/themes always. And do a full backup only once in a month (depending on plugin update frequency)

• In PRO version – you can exclude large files and folders from your backup. This reduces the size of your backup.
• In addition – you can exclude plugins from your backup in PRO version.
• Also you can export your backups to Google Drive and Dropbox in PRO version. This way your backups is stored in external storage. And you can delete all redundant backups in your server to free up the disk space (since you have backups in cloud) – if you need it. 
• Finally if you have already downloaded all important Prime Mover backups in your local computer and want to clean up your site of all Prime Mover packages – you can delete all them at once by following this tutorial.

Still need assistance?

If you still need technical assistance – please let us know. To speed up technical assistance – you can share your SFTP access/ WordPress admin access if you are still unable to access your site after following all the above steps. Please send it via our technical support contact page.