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Since upgrading to Ubuntu 12.10 backups no longer work (using the default Deja-Dup Backup tool). I always get the message: No space left in ‘/’. (which is NOT the path I backup to).

The preferences are set to back up my Home ignoring Trash. And the destination has ~500GB of space free!

Is there some way to get to the cause of this strange error? (which internally fails, because not being able to allocate space in /tmp.)

EDIT: Added more details.

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This is WAY to vague to be answerable in its current form. You will have to specify what you are using to backup, and how you have it configured. – psusi Nov 12 '12 at 16:03
I did look at the sourcecode but that didn't really make things clearer. – LCID Fire Nov 12 '12 at 17:33
How much free space to you have on /? – psusi Nov 13 '12 at 3:44
@psusi 10.5GB free space on / – LCID Fire Nov 13 '12 at 10:00
I'm having the same problem with the addition that / has at least 1Gb of free space. – zorkerz Jan 20 at 21:38

2 Answers

up vote 0 down vote

I don't use that tool but I suppose that even if it doesn't backup to the same directory, it needs to store some logs or temporary data somewhere on it.

Apart from the fact that having your root filesystem full is a bigger issue that needs solving first, I'll suggest a generic idea for finding out where it writes to.

  1. Free up some space on your root filesystem. Find logfiles under /var/log that might have grown too large and haven't been modified in the last, say 3 days:

    find /var/log -xdev -mtime +3

  2. Move them elsewhere outside of your root fs or compress them (gzip/bzip2)

  3. Set deja dup to back up a small directory
  4. Create a file in /tmp: touch /tmp/tstamp
  5. Run deja-dup
  6. Find files which it modifies with find / -xdev -newer /tmp/tstamp

If it's the temporary files it needs to created on your root filesystem somewhere, you'll probably need to run the last find command during the execution of your backup.

Otherwise, if it's just the logfiles, you could probably find them after you run your backup. But ultimately, you need to free up space on your root FS.

Do you have separate partitions for /home, /tmp, etc.?

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Thanks for trying to help. The problem was, that the error message is plain wrong. Looking at the failstack of duplicity made the real reason obvious. – LCID Fire Dec 28 '12 at 16:07
@ LCID Fire - What did you do to get Deja-dup to successfully backup? – zorkerz Jan 20 at 21:40
@zorkerz Nothing. Deja-dup does not work. Period. You have to invoke duplicity manually. See answer. – LCID Fire Jan 20 at 23:51
up vote 0 down vote accepted

This is a problem with Deja, since the UI does not allow for changing the tempdir. If e.g. you want to use tmpfs you probably have to invoke duplicity manually via:

duplicity --no-encryption --gio --tempdir /var/tmp /home/<username> file:///<yourbackupdir>

See https://bugs.launchpad.net/deja-dup/+bug/872233/comments/6

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