Directory Server Administration Files

Some Directory Server administration files can potentially become very large. These files include the LDIF files containing directory data, backups, core files, and log files.

Depending on your deployment, you may use LDIF both to import Directory Server data, and to serve as auxiliary backup. A standard text format, LDIF allows you to export binary data as well as strings. LDIF can occupy significant disk space in large deployments. For example, a directory containing 10 million entries having an average size of 2 kilobytes, would in LDIF representation occupy 20 gigabytes on disk. You might maintain multiple LDIF files of that size if you use the format for auxiliary backup.

Binary backup files also occupy space on disk, at least until you move them somewhere else for safekeeping. Backup files produced with Directory Server utilities consist of binary copies of the directory database files. Alternatively for large deployments you can put Directory Server in frozen mode and take a snapshot of the file system. Either way, you must have disk space available for the backup.

By default Directory Server writes log messages to instance-path/logs/access and instance-path/logs/errors. By default Directory Server requires one gigabyte of local disk space for access logging, and another 200 megabytes of local disk space for errors logging.

For a detailed discussion of Directory Server logging, read Chapter 7, Directory Server Logging, in Sun Java System Directory Server Enterprise Edition 6.3 Reference.