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I'm trying to backup my home directory (excluding a few folders). The backup is saved on a ~300 GB partition (called backups) of an internal drive, but not the same drive as the home directory. When I try to backup, everything goes OK until at some point Déjà Dup says there is no space left on "backups". The problem is that Déjà Dup only used ~20 GB at this point, so there is a ton of space left. I tried several times without luck.

Why is Déjà Dup saying this?

The size of my home directory, without the excluded folders, is 136 GB.

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5 Answers 5

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So there are three possible places where Deja Dup might be out of space, and I don't think its error message tells you which. There is a bug filed about that.

  • You may have run out of space on the target partition (which it sounds like you didn't)
  • You may have run out of space in your home directory (~/.cache/deja-dup can get large)
  • You may have run out of space in /tmp
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    Strange that it explicitly says that "backups" is out of space although the problem it's in another partition. I'll try to free some space in my home directory and in /tmp. Thanks
    – Gerard Abello
    Oct 16, 2011 at 17:02
  • In my case the message is No space left in '/.' (one partition, which is 14% used) while the problem arguably comes from ~/cache/deja-dup (another partition, almost 100% used). This is my own evidence that the error message is misleading as to where the problem actually resides
    – XavierStuvw
    Dec 21, 2017 at 20:23
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You can move the location of the cache-directory as follows (create a symlink to a new cache location)

mkdir /othervolume/.deja-dup-cache
mv ~/.cache/deja-dup/* /othervolume/.deja-dup-cache/
rmdir ~/.cache/deja-dup
ln -sf /othervolume/.deja-dup-cache ~/.cache/deja-dup

to change the location of the tmp-directory have a look at the following post: Deja Dup backup, change use of /tmp to another folder/location

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    Hi, this is something I'd like to do as my .cache directory keeps filling up. Will moving my deja-dup-cache to the same volume I'm backing up pose a security risk to an encrypted backup. My Home is encrypted but my backup volume is not.
    – nhorning
    Nov 17, 2014 at 6:11
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I had the same problem

I had >900Gb left on the partition, 13Gb left on the cache folder in ~ and /tmp contained only 13 Kb

I solved the problem just by rebooting

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I am operating my root system on an SSD drive, and once read an article about swapping certain folders like /tmp, /var/log, and so on to RAM, which lowers your potential RAM space and the size of the /tmp folder. Exactly this swapping of my /tmp folder caused the no space left error in Deja Dup.

Here is what I did to my fstab back then (sorry, it's in German).

...and parts of the code to put in fstab:

tmpfs   /tmp    tmpfs   nosuid  0   0

So if you made the same changes to your fstab in order to improve performance, simply undo it like this:

# tmpfs /tmp    tmpfs   nosuid  0   0
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You might try formatting your backup partition as NTFS.

I had exactly the same error when these two conditions came together:

  • the backup partition is formatted as FAT.
  • the backup included huge files such as virtual hard disc images for VirtualBox.

Formatting the backup partition as NTFS resolved the problem in my case.

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