You may also want to set a limited lifetime for backups to prevent regular
backups using all your disk space. To do this add the following lines to
`/etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb` and reconfigure:
```
# limit backup lifetime to 7 days - 604800 seconds
gitlab_rails['backup_keep_time'] = 604800
```
NOTE: This cron job does not [backup your omnibus-gitlab configuration](#backup-and-restore-omnibus-gitlab-configuration) or [SSH host keys](https://superuser.com/questions/532040/copy-ssh-keys-from-one-server-to-another-server/532079#532079).
## Alternative backup strategies
If your GitLab server contains a lot of Git repository data you may find the GitLab backup script to be too slow.